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Call number VC813 C52w 1901 (North Carolina Collection, UNC-Chapel Hill) The Wife of His Youth and Other Stories of the Color Lineby Charles W. ChesnuttBoston and New York, Houghton, Mifflin and Company 1901

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MR. RYDER was going to give a ball.
There were several reasons why this was an
opportune time for such an event.

Mr. Ryder might aptly be called the dean
of the Blue Veins. The original Blue Veins
were a little society of colored persons organized
in a certain Northern city shortly after
the war. Its purpose was to establish and
maintain correct social standards among a
people whose social condition presented almost
unlimited room for improvement. By accident,
combined perhaps with some natural affinity, the
society consisted of individuals who were, generally
speaking, more white than black. Some envious
outsider made the suggestion that no one was
eligible for membership who was not white
enough to show blue veins. The suggestion
was readily adopted by those who were not
of the favored few,
and since that time the society, though possessing
a longer and more pretentious name, had been
known far and wide as the “Blue Vein Society”
and its members as the “Blue Veins.”

The Blue Veins did not allow that any such
requirement existed for admission to their circle,
but, on the contrary, declared that character and
culture were the only things considered; and that if
most of their members were light-colored, it was
because such persons, as a rule, had had better
opportunities to qualify themselves for
membership. Opinions differed, too, as to the
usefulness of the society. There were those who
had been known to assail it violently as a glaring
example of the very prejudice from which the
colored race had suffered most; and later, when
such critics had succeeded in getting on the inside,
they had been heard to maintain with zeal and
earnestness that the society was a lifeboat, an
anchor, a bulwark and a shield, - a
pillar of cloud by day and of fire by night, to
guide their people through the social wilderness.
Another alleged prerequisite for Blue Vein
membership was that of free birth; and
while there was really no such requirement, it
is doubtless true that very few of the members
would have been unable to meet it if there had
been. If there were one or two of the older
members who had come up from the South and
from slavery, their history presented enough
romantic circumstances to rob their servile origin
of its grosser aspects.

While there were no such tests of eligibility, it is
true that the Blue Veins had their notions on these
subjects, and that not all of them were equally
liberal in regard to the things they collectively
disclaimed. Mr. Ryder was one of the most
conservative. Though he had not been among the
founders of the society, but had come in some
years later, his genius for social leadership was
such that he had speedily become its recognized
adviser and head, the custodian of its standards,
and the preserver of its traditions. He shaped its
social policy, was active in providing for its
entertainment, and when the interest fell off, as it
sometimes did, he fanned the embers until they
burst again into a cheerful flame.

There were still other reasons for his
popularity. While he was not as white as some of
the Blue Veins, his appearance was such
as to confer distinction upon them. His features
were of a refined type, his hair was almost straight;
he was always neatly dressed; his manners were
irreproachable, and his morals above suspicion.
He had come to Groveland a young man, and
obtaining employment in the office of a railroad
company as messenger had in time worked himself
up to the position of stationery clerk, having charge
of the distribution of the office supplies for the
whole company. Although the lack of early training
had hindered the orderly development of a
naturally fine mind, it had not prevented him from
doing a great deal of reading or from forming
decidedly literary tastes. Poetry was his passion.
He could repeat whole pages of the great English
poets; and if his pronunciation was sometimes
faulty, his eye, his voice, his gestures, would
respond to the changing sentiment with a precision
that revealed a poetic soul and disarmed criticism.
He was economical, and had saved money; he
owned and occupied a very comfortable house on
a respectable street. His residence was handsomely
furnished, containing among other things a good
library, especially rich in poetry, a piano, and some
choice engravings. He generally shared his house
with some young couple, who looked after his
wants and were company for him; for Mr. Ryder
was a single man. In the early days of his
connection with the Blue Veins he had been
regarded as quite a catch, and young ladies and
their mothers had manœuvred with much
ingenuity to capture him. Not, however, until Mrs.
Molly Dixon visited Groveland had any woman
ever made him wish to change his condition to
that of a married man.

Mrs. Dixon had come to Groveland from
Washington in the spring, and before the summer
was over she had won Mr. Ryder's heart. She
possessed many attractive qualities. She was
much younger than he; in fact, he was old enough
to have been her father, though no one knew
exactly how old he was. She was whiter than he,
and better educated. She had moved in the best
colored society of the country, at Washington, and
had taught in the schools of that city. Such a
superior person had been eagerly welcomed to
the Blue Vein Society, and had taken a leading
part in its activities. Mr. Ryder had at first been
attracted by her charms of person,
for she was very good looking and not over
twenty-five; then by her refined manners and the
vivacity of her wit. Her husband had been a
government clerk, and at his death had left a
considerable life insurance. She was visiting friends
in Groveland, and, finding the town and the people
to her liking, had prolonged her stay indefinitely.
She had not seemed displeased at Mr. Ryder's
attentions, but on the contrary had given him every
proper encouragement; indeed, a younger and less
cautious man would long since have spoken. But
he had made up his mind, and had only to
determine the time when he would ask her to be
his wife. He decided to give a ball in her honor,
and at some time during the evening of the ball to
offer her his heart and hand. He had no special
fears about the outcome, but, with a little touch of
romance, he wanted the surroundings to be in
harmony with his own feelings when he should
have received the answer he expected.

Mr. Ryder resolved that this ball should
mark an epoch in the social history of
Groveland. He knew, of course, - no one could
know better, - the entertainments that had
taken place in past years, and what must be done
to surpass them. His ball must be worthy of the
lady in whose honor it was to be given, and must,
by the quality of its guests, set an example for the
future. He had observed of late a growing
liberality, almost a laxity, in social matters, even
among members of his own set, and had several
times been forced to meet in a social way persons
whose complexions and callings in life were hardly
up to the standard which he considered proper for
the society to maintain. He had a theory of his
own.

“I have no race prejudice,” he would say, “but
we people of mixed blood are ground between
the upper and the nether millstone. Our fate lies
between absorption by the white race and
extinction in the black. The one does n't want us
yet, but may take us in time. The other would
welcome us, but it would be for us a backward
step. ‘With malice towards none, with charity for
all,’ we must do the best we can for ourselves and
those who are to follow us. Self-preservation is
the first law of nature.”

His ball would serve by its exclusiveness to
counteract leveling tendencies, and his
marriage with Mrs. Dixon would help to further the
upward process of absorption he had been
wishing and waiting for.

II

The ball was to take place on Friday night. The
house had been put in order, the carpets covered
with canvas, the halls and stairs decorated with
palms and potted plants; and in the afternoon Mr.
Ryder sat on his front porch, which the shade of a
vine running up over a wire netting made a cool
and pleasant lounging place. He expected to
respond to the toast “The Ladies” at the supper,
and from a volume of Tennyson - his favorite
poet - was fortifying himself with apt quotations.
The volume was open at “A Dream of Fair Women.”
His eyes fell on these lines, and he read them aloud to
judge better of their effect: -

“At length I saw a lady within call,Stiller than chisell'd marble, standing there;A daughter of the gods, divinely tall,And most divinely fair.”

He marked the verse, and turning the page
read the stanza beginning, -

“O sweet pale Margaret,O rare pale Margaret.”

He weighed the passage a moment, and decided
that it would not do. Mrs. Dixon was the palest
lady he expected at the ball, and she was of a
rather ruddy complexion, and of lively disposition
and buxom build. So he ran over the leaves until
his eye rested on the description of Queen Guinevere: -

“She seem'd a part of joyous Spring:A gown of grass-green silk she wore,Buckled with golden clasps before;A light-green tuft of plumes she boreClosed in a golden ring.. . . . . .“She look'd so lovely, as she sway'dThe rein with dainty finger-tips,A man had given all other bliss,And all his worldly worth for this,To waste his whole heart in one kissUpon her perfect lips.”

As Mr. Ryder murmured these words audibly,
with an appreciative thrill, he heard the latch of his
gate click, and a light footfall sounding on the
steps. He turned his head, and saw a woman
standing before his door.

She was a little woman, not five feet tall, and
proportioned to her height. Although she stood
erect, and looked around her with very bright and
restless eyes, she seemed
quite old; for her face was crossed and recrossed
with a hundred wrinkles, and around the edges of
her bonnet could be seen protruding here and
there a tuft of short gray wool. She wore a blue
calico gown of ancient cut, a little red shawl
fastened around her shoulders with an
old-fashioned brass brooch, and a large bonnet
profusely ornamented with faded red and yellow
artificial flowers. And she was very black, - so
black that her toothless gums, revealed when she
opened her mouth to speak, were not red, but
blue. She looked like a bit of the old plantation
life, summoned up from the past by the wave of a
magician's wand, as the poet's fancy had called
into being the gracious shapes of which Mr.
Ryder had just been reading.

He rose from his chair and came over to
where she stood.

“Good-afternoon, madam,” he said.

“Good-evenin', suh” she answered, ducking
suddenly with a quaint curtsy. Her voice was
shrill and piping, but softened somewhat by age.
“Is dis yere whar Mistuh Ryduh lib, suh?” she
asked, looking around her doubtfully, and
glancing into the open
windows, through which some of the
preparations for the evening were visible.

“Yes,” he replied, with an air of kindly
patronage, unconsciously flattered by her
manner, “I am Mr. Ryder. Did you want to see
me?”

“Yas, suh, ef I ain't 'sturbin' of you too much.”

“Not at all. Have a seat over here behind the
vine, where it is cool. What can I do for you?”

“ 'Scuse me, suh,” she continued, when she had
sat down on the edge of a chair, “ 'scuse me, suh,
I 's lookin' for my husban'. I heerd you wuz a big
man an' had libbed heah a long time, an' I 'lowed
you would n't min' ef I'd come roun' an' ax you ef
you'd ever heerd of a merlatter man by de name
er Sam Taylor 'quirin' roun' in de chu'ches
ermongs' de people fer his wife 'Liza Jane?”

Mr. Ryder seemed to think for a moment.

“There used to be many such cases right after
the war,” he said, “but it has been so long that I
have forgotten them. There are very few now.
But tell me your story, and it may refresh my
memory.”

She sat back farther in her chair so as to
be more comfortable, and folded her withered
hands in her lap.

“My name's 'Liza,” she began, “ 'Liza
Jane. W'en I wuz young I us'ter b'long ter Marse
Bob Smif, down in ole Missoura. I wuz bawn
down dere. W'en I wuz a gal I wuz married ter a
man named Jim. But Jim died, an' after dat I
married a merlatter man named Sam Taylor. Sam
wuz freebawn, but his mammy and daddy died,
an' de w'ite folks 'prenticed him ter my marster fer
ter work fer 'im 'tel he wuz growed up. Sam
worked in de fiel', an' I wuz de cook. One day
Ma'y Ann, ole miss's maid, came rushin' out ter
de kitchen, an' says she, ‘ 'Liza Jane, ole marse
gwine sell yo' Sam down de ribber.’

“I's be'n lookin' fer 'im eber sence,” she added
simply, as though twenty-five years were but a
couple of weeks, “an' I knows he 's be'n lookin'
fer me. Fer he sot a heap er sto' by me, Sam did,
an' I know he 's be'n huntin' fer me all dese
years, - 'less'n he 's be'n sick er sump'n, so he
could n' work, er out'n his head, so he could n'
'member his promise. I went back down de ribber,
fer I 'lowed he 'd gone down dere lookin' fer me.
I's be'n ter Noo Orleens, an' Atlanty, an'
Charleston, an' Richmon'; an' w'en I 'd be'n all
ober de Souf I come ter de Norf. Fer I knows I'll
fin' 'im some er dese days,” she added softly,
“er he'll fin' me, an' den we'll bofe be as happy
in freedom as we wuz in de ole days befo' de
wah.” A smile stole over her withered
countenance as she paused a moment, and her
bright eyes softened into a faraway look.

This was the substance of the old woman's
story. She had wandered a little here and there.
Mr. Ryder was looking at her curiously when she
finished.

“How have you lived all these years?” he
asked.

“Cookin', suh. I's a good cook. Does you
know anybody w'at needs a good cook, suh? I 's
stoppin' wid a culled fam'ly roun' de corner
yonder 'tel I kin git a place.”

“Do you really expect to find your husband?
He may be dead long ago.”

She shook her head emphatically. “Oh no, he
ain' dead. De signs an' de tokens tells me. I
dremp three nights runnin' on'y dis las' week dat
I foun' him.”

“He may have married another woman.
Your slave marriage would not have prevented
him, for you never lived with him after the war,
and without that your marriage does n't count.”

“Perhaps he 's outgrown you, and climbed up
in the world where he wouldn't care to have you
find him.”

“No, indeed, suh,” she replied, “Sam ain' dat
kin' er man. He wuz good ter me, Sam wuz, but
he wuz n' much good ter nobody e'se, fer he wuz
one er de triflin'es' han's on de plantation. I
'spec's ter haf ter suppo't 'im w'en I fin' 'im, fer he
nebber would work 'less'n he had ter. But den he
wuz free, an' he did n' git no pay fer his work, an'
I don' blame 'im much. Mebbe he's done better
sence he run erway, but I ain' 'spectin' much.”

“You may have passed him on the street a
hundred times during the twenty-five years, and
not have known him; time works great
changes.”

“May I see it?” asked Mr. Ryder. “It might
help me to remember whether I have seen the
original.”

As she drew a small parcel from her bosom he
saw that it was fastened to a string that went
around her neck. Removing several wrappers,
she brought to light an old fashioned
daguerreotype in a black case. He looked long
and intently at the portrait. It was faded with time,
but the features were still distinct, and it was easy
to see what manner of man it had represented.

He closed the case, and with a slow movement
handed it back to her.

“I don't know of any man in town who goes by
that name,” he said, “nor have I heard of any one
making such inquiries. But if you will leave me
your address, I will give the matter some
attention, and if I find out anything I will let you
know.”

She gave him the number of a house in the
neighborhood, and went away, after thanking
him warmly.

He wrote the address on the fly-leaf of the
volume of Tennyson, and, when she had gone,
rose to his feet and stood looking after her
curiously. As she walked down the street with
mincing step, he saw several persons whom she
passed turn and look back at her with a smile of
kindly amusement. When she had turned the
corner, he went upstairs to his bedroom, and
stood for a long time before the mirror of his
dressing-case, gazing thoughtfully at the reflection
of his own face.

III

At eight o'clock the ballroom was a blaze of
light and the guests had begun to assemble; for
there was a literary programme and some routine
business of the society to be gone through with
before the dancing. A black servant in evening
dress waited at the door and directed the guests
to the dressing-rooms.

The occasion was long memorable among the colored
people of the city; not alone for the dress
and display, but for the high average of intelligence
and culture that distinguished the gathering as a whole. There
were a number of school-teachers, several young
doctors, three or four lawyers, some professional
singers, an editor, a lieutenant in the United States
army spending his furlough in the city, and others
in various polite callings; these were colored,
though most of them would not have attracted
even a casual glance because of any marked
difference from white people. Most of the ladies
were in evening costume, and dress coats and
dancing pumps were the rule among the men. A
band of string music, stationed in an alcove behind
a row of palms, played popular airs while the
guests were gathering.

The dancing began at half past nine. At eleven
o'clock supper was served. Mr. Ryder had left
the ballroom some little time before the
intermission, but reappeared at the supper-table.
The spread was worthy of the occasion, and the
guests did full justice to it. When the coffee had
been served, the toastmaster, Mr. Solomon
Sadler, rapped for order. He made a brief
introductory speech, complimenting host and
guests, and then presented in their order the toasts
of the evening. They were responded to with a
very fair display of after-dinner wit.

“The last toast,” said the toast-master, when he
reached the end of the list, “is one which must
appeal to us all. There is no one of us of the
sterner sex who is not at some time dependent
upon woman, - in infancy for protection, in
manhood for companionship, in old age for care
and comforting. Our good host has been trying to
live alone, but the fair faces I see around me to-night
prove that he too is largely dependent upon
the gentler sex for most that makes life worth
living, - the society and love of friends, - and
rumor is at fault if he does not soon yield entire
subjection to one of them. Mr. Ryder will now
respond to the toast, - The Ladies.”

There was a pensive look in Mr. Ryder's eyes
as he took the floor and adjusted his eyeglasses.
He began by speaking of woman as the gift of
Heaven to man, and after some general observations
on the relations of the sexes he said: “But perhaps
the quality which most distinguishes woman is her
fidelity and devotion to those she loves. History is
full of examples, but has recorded none more striking
than one which only to-day came under my notice.”

He then related, simply but effectively, the
story told by his visitor of the afternoon. He gave
it in the same soft dialect, which came readily to
his lips, while the company listened attentively and
sympathetically. For the story had awakened a
responsive thrill in many hearts. There were some
present who had seen, and others who had heard
their fathers and grandfathers tell, the wrongs and
sufferings of this past generation, and all of them
still felt, in their darker moments, the shadow
hanging over them. Mr. Ryder went on: -

“Such devotion and confidence are rare even
among women. There are many who would have
searched a year, some who would have waited
five years, a few who might have hoped ten
years; but for twenty-five years this woman has
retained her affection for and her faith in a man
she has not seen or heard of in all that time.

“She came to me to-day in the hope that I
might be able to help her find this long-lost
husband. And when she was gone I gave my
fancy rein, and imagined a case I will put to
you.

“Suppose that this husband, soon after his
escape, had learned that his wife had been
sold away, and that such inquiries as he could
make brought no information of her whereabouts.
Suppose that he was young, and she much older
than he; that he was light, and she was black; that
their marriage was a slave marriage, and legally
binding only if they chose to make it so after the
war. Suppose, too, that he made his way to the
North as some of us have done, and there, where
he had larger opportunities, had improved them,
and had in the course of all these years grown to
be as different from the ignorant boy who ran away
from fear of slavery as the day is from the night.
Suppose, even, that he had qualified himself, by
industry, by thrift, and by study, to win the
friendship and be considered worthy the society of
such people as these I see around me to-night,
gracing my board and filling my heart with
gladness; for I am old enough to remember the day
when such a gathering would not have been possible
in this land. Suppose, too, that, as the years went by,
this man's memory of the past grew more and more
indistinct, until at last it was rarely, except in his dreams,
that any image of this bygone period rose before
his mind. And then suppose that accident
should bring to his knowledge the fact that the
wife of his youth, the wife he had left behind
him, - not one who had walked by his side and
kept pace with him in his upward struggle, but one
upon whom advancing years and a laborious life
had set their mark, - was alive and seeking him,
but that he was absolutely safe from recognition or
discovery, unless he chose to reveal himself. My
friends, what would the man do? I will presume
that he was one who loved honor, and tried to
deal justly with all men. I will even carry the case
further, and suppose that perhaps he had set his
heart upon another, whom he had hoped to call
his own. What would he do, or rather what ought
he to do, in such a crisis of a lifetime?

“It seemed to me that he might hesitate, and I
imagined that I was an old friend, a near friend,
and that he had come to me for advice; and I
argued the case with him. I tried to discuss it
impartially. After we had looked upon the matter
from every point of view, I said to him, in words
that we all know: -

‘This above all: to shine own self be true,And it must follow, as the night the day,Thou canst not then be false to any man.’

Then, finally, I put the question to him, ‘Shall you
acknowledge her?’

“And now, ladies and gentlemen, friends and
companions, I ask you, what should he have
done?”

There was something in Mr. Ryder's voice that
stirred the hearts of those who sat around him. It
suggested more than mere sympathy with an
imaginary situation; it seemed rather in the nature
of a personal appeal. It was observed, too, that
his look rested more especially upon Mrs. Dixon,
with a mingled expression of renunciation and
inquiry.

She had listened, with parted lips and
streaming eyes. She was the first to speak:
“He should have acknowledged her.”

“Yes,” they all echoed, “he should have
acknowledged her.”

“My friends and companions,” responded Mr.
Ryder, “I thank you, one and all. It is the answer
I expected, for I knew your hearts.”

He turned and walked toward the closed door
of an adjoining room, while every eye followed
him in wondering curiosity. He came back in a
moment, leading by the hand his visitor of the
afternoon, who stood startled
and trembling at the sudden plunge into this scene
of brilliant gayety. She was neatly dressed in
gray, and wore the white cap of an elderly
woman.

“Ladies and gentlemen,” he said, “this is the
woman, and I am the man, whose story I have
told you. Permit me to introduce to you the wife
of my youth.”

HER VIRGINIA MAMMY
I

THE pianist had struck up a lively two-step,
and soon the floor was covered with couples,
each turning on its own axis, and all revolving
around a common centre, in obedience perhaps
to the same law of motion that governs the
planetary systems. The dancing-hall was a long
room, with a waxed floor that glistened with the
reflection of the lights from the chandeliers. The
walls were hung in paper of blue and white,
above a varnished hard wood wainscoting; the
monotony of surface being broken by numerous
windows draped with curtains of dotted muslin,
and by occasional engravings and colored
pictures representing the dances of various
nations, judiciously selected. The rows of chairs
along the two sides of the room were left
unoccupied by the time the music was well under
way, for the pianist, a tall colored woman with
long fingers and a muscular wrist, played
with a verve and a swing that set the feet of the
listeners involuntarily in motion.

The dance was sure to occupy the class for a
quarter of an hour at least, and the little
dancing-mistress took the opportunity to slip away to her
own sitting-room, which was on the same floor of
the block, for a few minutes of rest. Her day had
been a hard one. There had been a matinee at
two o'clock, a children's class at four, and at eight
o'clock the class now on the floor had assembled.

When she reached the sitting-room she gave a
start of pleasure. A young man rose at her
entrance, and advanced with both hands
extended - a tall, broad-shouldered, fair-haired
young man, with a frank and kindly countenance,
now lit up with the animation of pleasure. He
seemed about twenty-six or twenty-seven years
old. His face was of the type one instinctively
associates with intellect and character, and it gave
the impression, besides, of that intangible
something which we call race. He was neatly and
carefully dressed, though his clothing was not
without indications that he found it necessary or
expedient to practice economy.

“Good-evening, Clara,” he said, taking her
hands in his; “I've been waiting for you five
minutes. I supposed you would be in, but if you
had been a moment later I was going to the hall to
look you up. You seem tired tonight,” he added,
drawing her nearer to him and scanning her
features at short range. “This work is too hard;
you are not fitted for it. When are you going to
give it up?”

“The season is almost over,” she answered,
“and then I shall stop for the summer.”

He drew her closer still and kissed her
lovingly. “Tell me, Clara,” he said, looking down
into her face, - he was at least a foot taller than
she, - “when I am to have my answer.”

“Will you take the answer you can get
tonight?” she asked with a wan smile.

“I will take but one answer, Clara. But do not
make me wait too long for that. Why, just think
of it! I have known you for six months.”

“That is an extremely long time,” said Clara,
as they sat down side by side.

“It has been an age,” he rejoined. “For a
fortnight of it, too, which seems longer than all the
rest, I have been waiting for my answer. I am
turning gray under the suspense.
Seriously, Clara dear, what shall it be? Or
rather, when shall it be? for to the other question
there is but one answer possible.”

He looked into her eyes, which slowly filled
with tears. She repulsed him gently as he bent
over to kiss them away.

“You know I love you, John, and why I do
not say what you wish. You must give me a little
more time to make up my mind before I can
consent to burden you with a nameless wife, one
who does not know who her mother was” -

“She was a good woman, and beautiful, if
you are at all like her.”

“Or her father” -

“He was a gentleman and a scholar, if you
inherited from him your mind or your manners.”

“It is good of you to say that, and I try to
believe it. But it is a serious matter; it is a dreadful
thing to have no name.”

“You are known by a worthy one, which was
freely given you, and is legally yours.”

“I know - and I am grateful for it. After all,
though, it is not my real name; and since I have
learned that it was not, it seems like a
garment - something external, accessory, and
not a part of myself. It does not mean what
one's own name would signify.”

“Take mine, Clara, and make it yours; I lay it
at your feet. Some honored men have borne it.”

“Ah yes, and that is what makes my position
the harder. Your great-grandfather was governor
of Connecticut.”

“I have heard my mother say so.”

“And one of your ancestors came over in the
Mayflower.”

“In some capacity - I have never been quite
clear whether as ship's cook or before the mast.”

“Now you are insincere, John; but you cannot
deceive me. You never spoke in that way about
your ancestors until you learned that I had none. I
know you are proud of them, and that the
memory of the governor and the judge and the
Harvard professor and the Mayflower pilgrim
makes you strive to excel, in order to prove
yourself worthy of them.”

“It did until I met you, Clara. Now the one
inspiration of my life is the hope to make you
mine.”

“And your profession?”

“It will furnish me the means to take you out
of this; you are not fit for toil.”

“And your book - your treatise that is to
make you famous?”

“I have worked twice as hard on it and accomplished
twice as much since I have hoped that you might
share my success.”

“Oh! if I but knew the truth!” she sighed, “or
could find it out! I realize that I am absurd, that I
ought to be happy. I love my parents - my
foster-parents - dearly. I owe them everything.
Mother - poor, dear mother! - could not have
loved me better or cared for me more faithfully
had I been her own child. Yet - I am ashamed to
say it - I always felt that I was not like them, that
there was a subtle difference between us. They
were contented in prosperity, resigned in
misfortune; I was ever restless, and filled with
vague ambitions. They were good, but dull. They
loved me, but they never said so. I feel that there
is warmer, richer blood coursing in my veins than
the placid stream that crept through theirs.”

“There will never be any such people to me
as they were,” said her lover, “for they took you
and brought you up for me.”

“Sometimes,” she went on dreamily, “I feel
sure that I am of good family, and the blood of
my ancestors seems to call to me in clear and
certain tones. Then again when my mood
changes, I am all at sea - I feel that even if I had
but simply to turn my hand to learn who I am and
whence I came, I should shrink from taking the
step, for fear that what I might learn would leave
me forever unhappy.”

“Dearest,” he said, taking her in his arms, while
from the hall and down the corridor came the
softened strains of music, “put aside these
unwholesome fancies. Your past is shrouded in
mystery. Take my name, as you have taken my
love, and I'll make your future so happy that
you won't have time to think of the past. What are
a lot of musty, mouldy old grandfathers,
compared with life and love and happiness? It's
hardly good form to mention one's ancestors
nowadays, and what 's the use of them at all if one
can't boast of them?”

“It's all very well of you to talk that way,” she
rejoined. “But suppose you should marry me,
and when you become famous and rich, and
patients flock to your office, and
fashionable people to your home, and every one
wants to know who you are and whence you
came, you'll be obliged to bring out the
governor, and the judge, and the rest of them. If
you should refrain, in order to forestall embarrassing
inquiries about my ancestry, I should have
deprived you of something you are entitled
to, something which has a real social value. And
when people found out all about you, as they
eventually would from some source, they would
want to know - we Americans are a curious
people - who your wife was, and you could only
say” -

“The best and sweetest woman on earth,
whom I love unspeakably.”

“You know that is not what I mean. You
could only say - a Miss Nobody, from
Nowhere.”

“A Miss Hohlfelder, from Cincinnati, the only
child of worthy German parents, who fled from
their own country in '49 to escape political
persecution - an ancestry that one surely need
not be ashamed of.”

“No; but the consciousness that it was not
true would be always with me, poisoning my
mind, and darkening my life and yours.”

“Your views of life are entirely too tragic,
Clara,” the young man argued soothingly. “We are
all worms of the dust, and if we go back far
enough, each of us has had millions of ancestors;
peasants and serfs, most of them; thieves,
murderers, and vagabonds, many of them, no
doubt; and therefore the best of us have but little
to boast of. Yet we are all made after God's own
image, and formed by his hand, for his ends; and
therefore not to be lightly despised, even the
humblest of us least of all by ourselves. For the
past we can claim no credit, for those who made it
died with it. Our destiny lies in the future.”

“Yes,” she sighed, “I know all that. But I am
not like you. A woman is not like a man; she
cannot lose herself in theories and generalizations.
And there are tests that even all your philosophy
could not endure. Suppose you should marry me,
and then some time, by the merest accident, you
should learn that my origin was the worst it could
be - that I not only had no name, but was not
entitled to one.”

“I cannot believe it,” he said, “and from what
we do know of your history it is hardly possible.
If I learned it, I should forget it, unless,
perchance, it should enhance your
value in my eyes, by stamping you as a rare work
of nature, an exception to the law of heredity, a
triumph of pure beauty and goodness over the
grosser limitations of matter. I cannot imagine,
now that I know you, anything that could make
me love you less. I would marry you just the
same - even if you were one of your dancing-class
to-night.”

“I must go back to them,” said Clara, as the
music ceased.

“My answer,” he urged, “give me my answer!”

“Not to-night, John,” she pleaded. “Grant me
a little longer time to make up my mind - for
your sake.”

“Not for my sake, Clara, no.”

“Well - for mine.” She let him take her in his
arms and kiss her again.

“I have a patient yet to see to-night,” he said
as he went out. “If I am not detained too long, I
may come back this way - if I see the lights in the
hall still burning. Do not wonder if I ask you again
for my answer, for I shall be unhappy until I get
it.”

II

A stranger entering the hall with Miss Hohlfelder
would have seen, at first glance, only a company
of well-dressed people, with nothing to specially
distinguish them from ordinary humanity in
temperate climates. After the eye had rested for a
moment and begun to separate the mass into its
component parts, one or two dark faces would
have arrested its attention; and with the suggestion
thus offered, a closer inspection would have
revealed that they were nearly all a little less than
white. With most of them this fact would not have
been noticed, while they were alone or in company
with one another, though if a fair white person had
gone among them it would perhaps have been
more apparent. From the few who were
undistinguishable from pure white, the colors ran
down the scale by minute gradations to the two or
three brown faces at the other extremity.

It was Miss Hohlfelder's first colored class.
She had been somewhat startled when first asked
to take it. No person of color had ever applied to
her for lessons; and while a woman
of that race had played the piano for her for
several months, she had never thought of colored
people as possible pupils. So when she was asked
if she would take a class of twenty or thirty, she
had hesitated, and begged for time to consider the
application. She knew that several of the more
fashionable dancing-schools tabooed all pupils,
singly or in classes, who labored under social
disabilities - and this included the people of at
least one other race who were vastly farther along
in the world than the colored people of the
community where Miss Hohlfelder lived.
Personally she had no such prejudice, except
perhaps a little shrinking at the thought of personal
contact with the dark faces of whom Americans
always think when “colored people” are spoken
of. Again, a class of forty pupils was not to be
despised, for she taught for money, which was
equally current and desirable, regardless of its
color. She had consulted her foster-parents, and
after them her lover. Her foster-parents, who were
German-born, and had never become thoroughly
Americanized, saw no objection. As for her lover,
he was indifferent.

“Do as you please,” he said. “ It may
drive away some other pupils. If it should break
up the business entirely, perhaps you might be
willing to give me a chance so much the sooner.”

She mentioned the matter to one or two other
friends, who expressed conflicting opinions. She
decided at length to take the class, and take the
consequences.

“I don't think it would be either right or kind
to refuse them for any such reason, and I don't
believe I shall lose anything by it.”

She was somewhat surprised, and pleasantly
so, when her class came together for their first
lesson, at not finding them darker and more
uncouth. Her pupils were mostly people whom
she would have passed on the street without a
second glance, and among them were several
whom she had known by sight for years, but had
never dreamed of as being colored people. Their
manners were good, they dressed quietly and as a
rule with good taste, avoiding rather than choosing
bright colors and striking combinations - whether
from natural preference, or because of a slightly
morbid shrinking from criticism, of course she
could not say. Among them, the dancing-mistress
soon learned, there were lawyers
and doctors, teachers, telegraph operators,
clerks, milliners and dressmakers, students of the
local college and scientific school, and, somewhat
to her awe at the first meeting, even a member of
the legislature. They were mostly young, although
a few light-hearted older people joined the class,
as much for company as for the dancing.

“ Of course, Miss Hohlfelder,” explained Mr.
Solomon Sadler, to whom the teacher had paid a
compliment on the quality of the class, “the more
advanced of us are not numerous enough to make
the fine distinctions that are possible among white
people; and of course as we rise in life we can't
get entirely away from our brothers and our sisters
and our cousins, who don't always keep abreast
of us. We do, however, draw certain lines of
character and manners and occupation. You see
the sort of people we are. Of course we have no
prejudice against color, and we regard all labor as
honorable, provided a man does the best he can.
But we must have standards that will give our
people something to aspire to.”

The class was not a difficult one, as many of
the members were already fairly good
dancers. Indeed the class had been formed as
much for pleasure as for instruction. Music and
hall rent and a knowledge of the latest dances
could be obtained cheaper in this way than in any
other. The pupils had made rapid progress,
displaying in fact a natural aptitude for rhythmic
motion, and a keen susceptibility to musical
sounds. As their race had never been criticised for
these characteristics, they gave them full play, and
soon developed, most of them, into graceful and
indefatigable dancers. They were now almost at
the end of their course, and this was the evening
of the last lesson but one.

Miss Hohlfelder had remarked to her lover
more than once that it was a pleasure to teach
them. “They enter into the spirit of it so
thoroughly, and they seem to enjoy themselves so
much.”

“One would think,” he suggested, “that the
whitest of them would find their position painful
and more or less pathetic; to be so white and yet
to be classed as black - so near and yet so far.”

“They don't accept our classification blindly.
They do not acknowledge any inferiority; they
think they are a great deal
better than any but the best white people,”
replied Miss Hohlfelder. “And since they have
been coming here, do you know,” she went on,
“I hardly think of them as any different from other
people. I feel perfectly at home among them.”

“It is a great thing to have faith in one's self,” he
replied. “It is a fine thing, too, to be able to enjoy
the passing moment. One of your greatest charms
in my eyes, Clara, is that in your lighter moods
you have this faculty. You sing because you love
to sing. You find pleasure in dancing, even by
way of work. You feel the joi de vivre - the joy of living. You are not always so, but when you
are so I think you most delightful.”

Miss Hohlfelder, upon entering the hall,
spoke to the pianist and then exchanged a few
words with various members of the class. The
pianist began to play a dreamy Strauss waltz.
When the dance was well under way Miss
Hohlfelder left the hall again and stepped into the
ladies' dressing-room. There was a woman
seated quietly on a couch in a corner, her hands
folded on her lap.

“Good-evening, Miss Hohlfelder. You do not
seem as bright as usual to-night.”

Miss Hohlfelder felt a sudden yearning for
sympathy. Perhaps it was the gentle tones of the
greeting; perhaps the kindly expression of the soft
though faded eyes that were scanning Miss
Hohlfelder's features. The woman was of the
indefinite age between forty and fifty. There were
lines on her face which, if due to years, might have
carried her even past the half-century mark, but if
caused by trouble or ill health might leave her
somewhat below it. She was quietly dressed in
black, and wore her slightly wavy hair low over
her ears, where it lay naturally in the ripples which
some others of her sex so sedulously seek by art.
A little woman, of clear olive complexion and
regular features, her face was almost a perfect
oval, except as time had marred its outline. She
had been in the habit of coming to the class with
some young women of the family she lived with,
part boarder, part seamstress and friend of the
family. Sometimes, while waiting for her young
charges, the music would jar her nerves, and she
would seek the comparative quiet of the
dressing-room.

“Oh, I 'm all right, Mrs. Harper,” replied the
dancing-mistress, with a brave attempt at
cheerfulness, - “just a little tired, after a hard
day's work.”

She sat down on the couch by the elder
woman's side. Mrs. Harper took her hand and
stroked it gently, and Clara felt soothed and
quieted by her touch.

“There are tears in your eyes and trouble in
your face. I know it, for I have shed the one and
known the other. Tell me, child, what ails you? I
am older than you, and perhaps I have learned
some things in the hard school of life that may be
of comfort or service to you.”

Such a request, coming from a comparative
stranger, might very properly have been resented
or lightly parried. But Clara was not what would
be called self-contained. Her griefs seemed lighter
when they were shared with others, even in spirit.
There was in her nature a childish strain that
craved sympathy and comforting. She had never
known - or if so it was only in a dim and
dreamlike past - the tender, brooding care that
was her conception of a mother's love. Mrs.
Hohlfelder had been fond of her in a placid way,
and had given her every comfort and luxury her
means permitted. Clara' s
ideal of maternal love had been of another and
more romantic type; she had thought of a fond,
impulsive mother, to whose bosom she could fly
when in trouble or distress, and to whom she
could communicate her sorrows and trials; who
would dry her tears and soothe her with caresses.
Now, when even her kind foster-mother was
gone, she felt still more the need of sympathy and
companionship with her own sex; and when this
little Mrs. Harper spoke to her so gently, she felt
her heart respond instinctively.

“Yes, Mrs. Harper,” replied Clara with a sigh,
“I am in trouble, but it is trouble that you nor any
one else can heal.”

“You do not know, child. A simple remedy
can sometimes cure a very grave complaint. Tell
me your trouble, if it is something you are at
liberty to tell.”

“I have a story,” said Clara, “and it is a
strange one, - a story I have told to but one
other person, one very dear to me.”

“He must be dear to you indeed, from the
tone in which you speak of him. Your very
accents breathe love.”

“Yes, I love him, and if you saw him -
perhaps you have seen him, for he has looked
in here once or twice during the dancing-lessons
- you would know why I love him. He is handsome,
he is learned, he is ambitious, he is brave, he is
good; he is poor, but he will not always be so;
and he loves me, oh, so much!”

The other woman smiled. “It is not so strange
to love, nor yet to be loved. And all lovers are
handsome and brave and fond.”

“That is not all of my story. He wants to
marry me.” Clara paused, as if to let this
statement impress itself upon the other.

“True lovers always do,” said the elder
woman.

“But sometimes, you know, there are
circumstances which prevent them.”

“Ah yes,” murmured the other reflectively, and
looking at the girl with deeper interest, “circumstances
which prevent them. I have known of such a case.”

“The circumstance which prevents us from
marrying is my story.”

“Tell me your story, child, and perhaps, if I
cannot help you otherwise, I can tell you one that
will make yours seem less sad.”

“You know me,” said the young woman,
“as Miss Hohlfelder; but that is not actually
my name. In fact I do not know my real name,
for I am not the daughter of Mr. and Mrs.
Hohlfelder, but only an adopted child. While Mrs.
Hohlfelder lived, I never knew that I was not her
child. I knew I was very different from her and
father, - I mean Mr. Hohlfelder. I knew they were
fair and I was dark; they were stout and I was
slender; they were slow and I was quick. But of
course I never dreamed of the true reason of this
difference. When mother - Mrs. Hohlfelder - died,
I found among her things one day a little
packet, carefully wrapped up, containing a child's
slip and some trinkets. The paper wrapper of the
packet bore an inscription that awakened my
curiosity. I asked father Hohlfelder whose the
things had been, and then for the first time I
learned my real story.

“I was not their own daughter, he stated, but
an adopted child. Twenty-three years ago, when
he had lived in St. Louis, a steamboat explosion
had occurred up the river, and on a piece of
wreckage floating down stream, a girl baby had
been found. There was nothing on the child to
give a hint of its home or parentage; and no one
came to claim
it, though the fact that a child had been found was
advertised all along the river. It was believed that
the infant's parents must have perished in the
wreck, and certainly no one of those who were
saved could identify the child. There had been a
passenger list on board the steamer, but the list,
with the officer who kept it, had been lost in the
accident. The child was turned over to an orphan
asylum, from which within a year it was adopted
by the two kind-hearted and childless German
people who brought it up as their own. I was that
child.”

The woman seated by Clara's side had
listened with strained attention. “Did you learn the
name of the steamboat?” she asked quietly, but
quickly, when Clara paused.

“The Pride of St. Louis,” answered Clara. She
did not look at Mrs. Harper, but was gazing
dreamily toward the front, and therefore did not
see the expression that sprang into the other's
face, - a look in which hope struggled with fear,
and yearning love with both - nor the strong
effort with which Mrs. Harper controlled herself
and moved not one muscle while the other went on.

“I was never sought,” Clara continued,
“and the good people who brought me up gave me
every care. Father and mother - I can never train
my tongue to call them anything else - were very
good to me. When they adopted me they were
poor; he was a pharmacist with a small shop. Later
on he moved to Cincinnati, where he made and
sold a popular‘patent’ medicine and amassed a
fortune. Then I went to a fashionable school, was
taught French, and deportment, and dancing.
Father Hohlfelder made some bad investments,
and lost most of his money. The patent medicine
fell off in popularity. A year or two ago we came to
this city to live. Father bought this block and
opened the little drug store below. We moved into
the rooms upstairs. The business was poor, and I
felt that I ought to do something to earn money and
help support the family. I could dance; we had this
hall, and it was not rented all the time, so I opened
a dancing-school.”

“Tell me, child,” said the other woman, with
restrained eagerness, “what were the things found
upon you when you were taken from the river?”

“Yes,” answered the girl, “I will. But I have
not told you all my story, for this is but
the prelude. About a year ago a young doctor
rented an office in our block. We met each other,
at first only now and then, and afterwards
oftener; and six months ago he told me that he
loved me.”

She paused, and sat with half opened lips and
dreamy eyes, looking back into the past six
months.

“And the things found upon you” -

“Yes, I will show them to you when you have
heard all my story. He wanted to marry me, and
has asked me every week since. I have told him
that I love him, but I have not said I would marry
him. I don't think it would be right for me to do
so, unless I could clear up this mystery. I believe
he is going to be great and rich and famous, and
there might come a time when he would be
ashamed of me. I don't say that I shall never
marry him; for I have hoped - I have a
presentiment that in some strange way I shall find
out who I am, and who my parents were. It may
be mere imagination on my part, but somehow I
believe it is more than that.”

“Are you sure there was no mark on the
things that were found upon you?” said
the elder woman.

“Ah yes,” sighed Clara, “I am sure, for I have
looked at them a hundred times. They tell me
nothing, and yet they suggest to me many things.
Come,” she said, taking the other by the hand,
“and I will show them to you.”

She led the way along the hall to her
sitting-room, and to her bedchamber beyond. It
was a small room hung with paper showing a
pattern of morning-glories on a light ground, with
dotted muslin curtains, a white iron bedstead, a few
prints on the wall, a rocking-chair - a very dainty
room. She went to the maple dressing-case, and
opened one of the drawers.

As they stood for a moment, the mirror
reflecting and framing their image, more than one
point of resemblance between them was
emphasized. There was something of the same
oval face, and in Clara's hair a faint suggestion of
the wave in the older woman's; and though Clara
was fairer of complexion, and her eyes were gray
and the other's black, there was visible, under the
influence of the momentary excitement, one of
those indefinable likenesses which are at times
encountered, - sometimes marking blood
relationship, sometimes the impress of a common
training; in one case perhaps a mere earmark of
temperament, and in another the index of a type.
Except for the difference in color, one might
imagine that if the younger woman were twenty
years older the resemblance would be still more
apparent.

Clara reached her hand into the drawer and
drew out a folded packet, which she unwrapped,
Mrs. Harper following her movements meanwhile
with a suppressed intensity of interest which
Clara, had she not been absorbed in her own
thoughts, could not have failed to observe.

When the last fold of paper was removed
there lay revealed a child's muslin slip. Clara
lifted it and shook it gently until it was unfolded
before their eyes. The lower half was delicately
worked in a lacelike pattern, revealing an
immense amount of patient labor.

The elder woman seized the slip with hands
which could not disguise their trembling. Scanning
the garment carefully, she seemed to be noting
the pattern of the needlework, and then, pointing
to a certain spot, exclaimed: -

“I thought so! I was sure of it! Do you not
see the letters - M. S.?”

“Oh, how wonderful!” Clara seized the slip in
turn and scanned the monogram. “How strange
that you should see that at once and that I should
not have discovered it, who have looked at it a
hundred times! And here,” she added, opening a
small package which had been inclosed in the
other, “is my coral necklace. Perhaps your keen
eyes can find something in that.”

It was a simple trinket, at which the older
woman gave but a glance - a glance that added
to her emotion.

“Listen, child,” she said, laying her trembling
hand on the other's arm. “It is all very strange and
wonderful, for that slip and necklace, and, now
that I have seen them, your face and your voice
and your ways, all tell me who you are. Your
eyes are your father's eyes, your voice is your
father's voice. The slip was worked by your
mother's hand.”

“Oh!” cried Clara, and for a moment the
whole world swam before her eyes.

“ I was on the Pride of St. Louis, and I knew
your father - and your mother.”

Clara, pale with excitement, burst into tears,
and would have fallen had not the other woman
caught her in her arms. Mrs. Harper placed her
on the couch, and, seated by her side, supported
her head on her shoulder. Her hands seemed to
caress the young woman with every touch.

“Tell me, oh, tell me all!” Clara demanded,
when the first wave of emotion had subsided.
“Who were my father and my mother, and who
am I?”

The elder woman restrained her emotion with
an effort, and answered as composedly as she
could, -

“There were several hundred passengers on
the Pride of St. Louis when she left Cincinnati on
that fateful day, on her regular trip to New
Orleans. Your father and mother were on the
boat - and I was on the boat. We were going
down the river, to take ship at New Orleans for
France, a country which your father loved.”

“Who was my father?” asked Clara. The
woman's words fell upon her ear like water on a
thirsty soil.

“Your father was a Virginia gentleman, and
belonged to one of the first families, the
Staffords, of Melton County.”

Clara drew herself up unconsciously, and into
her face there came a frank expression of pride
which became it wonderfully, setting off a beauty
that needed only this to make it all but perfect of
its type.

“I knew it must be so,” she murmured. “I have
often felt it. Blood will always tell. And my
mother?”

“Your mother - also belonged to one of the
first families of Virginia, and in her veins flowed
some of the best blood of the Old Dominion.”

“What was her maiden name?”

“Mary Fairfax. As I was saying, your father
was a Virginia gentleman. He was as handsome a
man as ever lived, and proud, oh, so proud! - and
good, and kind. He was a graduate of the University
and had studied abroad.”

“My mother - was she beautiful?”

“She was much admired, and your father
loved her from the moment he first saw her. Your
father came back from Europe, upon his father's
sudden death, and entered upon his inheritance.
But he had been away from Virginia so long, and
had read so many books, that he had outgrown
his home. He did not
believe that slavery was right, and one of the first
things he did was to free his slaves. His views
were not popular, and he sold out his lands a
year before the war, with the intention of moving
to Europe.”

“In the mean time he had met and loved and
married my mother?”

“In the mean time he had met and loved your
mother.”

“My mother was a Virginia belle, was she
not?”

“The Fairfaxes,” answered Mrs. Harper, “were
the first of the first families, the bluest of the
blue-bloods. The Miss Fairfaxes were all
beautiful and all social favorites.”

“What did my father do then, when he had
sold out in Virginia?”

“He went with your mother and you - you
were then just a year old - to Cincinnati, to settle
up some business connected with his estate.
When he had completed his business, he
embarked on the Pride of St. Louis with you and
your mother and a colored nurse.”

“And how did you know about them?”
asked Clara.

“I was one of the party. I was” -

“You were the colored nurse? - my
‘mammy,’ they would have called you
in my old Virginia home?”

“Yes, child, I was - your mammy. Upon my
bosom you have rested; my breasts once gave
you nourishment; my hands once ministered to
you; my arms sheltered you, and my heart loved
you and mourned you like a mother loves and
mourns her firstborn.”

“Oh, how strange, how delightful!” exclaimed
Clara. “Now I understand why you clasped me
so tightly, and were so agitated when I told you
my story. It is too good for me to believe. I am of
good blood, of an old and aristocratic family. My
presentiment has come true. I can marry my
lover, and I shall owe all my happiness to you.
How can I ever repay you?”

“You can kiss me, child, kiss your mammy.”

Their lips met, and they were clasped in each
other's arms. One put into the embrace all of her
new-found joy, the other all the suppressed
feeling of the last half hour, which in turn
embodied the unsatisfied yearning of many years.

The music had ceased and the pupils had
left the hall. Mrs. Harper's charges had supposed
her gone, and had left for home without
her. But the two women, sitting in Clara's
chamber, hand in hand, were oblivious to
external things and noticed neither the hour nor
the cessation of the music.

“Why, dear mammy,” said the young woman
musingly, “did you not find me, and restore me
to my people?”

“Alas, child! I was not white, and when I was
picked up from the water, after floating miles
down the river, the man who found me kept me
prisoner for a time, and, there being no inquiry
for me, pretended not to believe that I was free,
and took me down to New Orleans and sold me
as a slave. A few years later the war set me free.
I went to St. Louis but could find no trace of you.
I had hardly dared to hope that a child had been
saved, when so many grown men and women
had lost their lives. I made such inquiries as I
could, but all in vain.”

“Did you go to the orphan asylum?”

“The orphan asylum had been burned and
with it all the records. The war had scattered the
people so that I could find no one who knew
about a lost child saved from a river
wreck. There were many orphans in those days,
and one more or less was not likely to dwell in
the public mind.”

“Did you tell my people in Virginia?”

“They, too, were scattered by the war. Your
uncles lost their lives on the battlefield. The family
mansion was burned to the ground. Your father's
remaining relatives were reduced to poverty, and
moved away from Virginia.”

“What of my mother's people?”

“They are all dead. God punished them. They
did not love your father, and did not wish him to
marry your mother. They helped to drive him to
his death.”

“I am alone in the world, then, without kith or
kin,” murmured Clara, “and yet, strange to say, I
am happy. If I had known my people and lost
them, I should be sad. They are gone, but they
have left me their name and their blood. I would
weep for my poor father and mother if I were not
so glad.”

Just then some one struck a chord upon the
piano in the hall, and the sudden breaking of the
stillness recalled Clara's attention to the lateness
of the hour.

“I had forgotten about the class,” she
exclaimed. “I must go and attend to them.”

They walked along the corridor and entered
the hall. Dr. Winthrop was seated at the piano,
drumming idly on the keys.

“I did not know where you had gone,” he
said. “I knew you would be around, of course,
since the lights were not out, and so I came in
here to wait for you.”

“Listen, John, I have a wonderful story to tell
you.”

Then she told him Mrs. Harper's story. He
listened attentively and sympathetically, at certain
points taking his eyes from Clara's face and
glancing keenly at Mrs. Harper, who was
listening intently. As he looked from one to the
other he noticed the resemblance between them,
and something in his expression caused Mrs.
Harper's eyes to fall, and then glance up
appealingly.

“And now,” said Clara, “I am happy. I know
my name. I am a Virginia Stafford. I belong to
one, yes, to two of what were the first families of
Virginia. John, my family is as good as yours. If I
remember my history correctly, the Cavaliers
looked down upon the Roundheads.”

“I admit my inferiority,” he replied. “If you
are happy I am glad.”

“Clara Stafford,” mused the girl. “It is a
pretty name.”

“You will never have to use it,” her lover
declared, “for now you will take mine.”

“Then I shall have nothing left of all that I
have found” -

“Except your husband,” asserted Dr.
Winthrop, putting his arm around her, with an air
of assured possession.

Mrs. Harper was looking at them with
moistened eyes in which joy and sorrow, love
and gratitude, were strangely blended. Clara put
out her hand to her impulsively.

“And my mammy,” she cried, “my dear
Virginia mammy.”

THE SHERIFF'S CHILDREN

BRANSON COUNTY, North Carolina, is in
a sequestered district of one of the staidest and
most conservative States of the Union. Society in
Branson County is almost primitive in its
simplicity. Most of the white people own the
farms they till, and even before the war there
were no very wealthy families to force their
neighbors, by comparison, into the category of
“poor whites.”

To Branson County, as to most rural
communities in the South, the war is the one
historical event that overshadows all others. It is
the era from which all local chronicles are
dated, - births, deaths, marriages, storms,
freshets. No description of the life of any
Southern community would be perfect that failed
to emphasize the all pervading influence of the
great conflict.

Yet the fierce tide of war that had rushed
through the cities and along the great highways
of the country had comparatively
speaking but slightly disturbed the sluggish current
of life in this region, remote from railroads and
navigable streams. To the north in Virginia, to the
west in Tennessee, and all along the seaboard the
war had raged; but the thunder of its cannon had
not disturbed the echoes of Branson County,
where the loudest sounds heard were the crack of
some hunter's rifle, the baying of some deep-mouthed
hound, or the yodel of some tuneful
negro on his way through the pine forest. To the
east, Sherman's army had passed on its march to
the sea; but no straggling band of “bummers” had
penetrated the confines of Branson County. The
war, it is true, had robbed the county of the
flower of its young manhood; but the burden of
taxation, the doubt and uncertainty of the conflict,
and the sting of ultimate defeat, had been borne
by the people with an apathy that robbed
misfortune of half its sharpness.

The nearest approach to town life afforded by
Branson County is found in the little village of
Troy, the county seat, a hamlet with a population
of four or five hundred.

Ten years make little difference in the
appearance of these remote Southern towns.
If a railroad is built through one of them, it infuses
some enterprise; the social corpse is galvanized
by the fresh blood of civilization that pulses along
the farthest ramifications of our great system of
commercial highways. At the period of which I
write, no railroad had come to Troy. If a traveler,
accustomed to the bustling life of cities, could
have ridden through Troy on a summer day, he
might easily have fancied himself in a deserted
village. Around him he would have seen
weather-beaten houses, innocent of paint, the
shingled roofs in many instances covered with a rich
growth of moss. Here and there he would have
met a razor-backed hog lazily rooting his way
along the principal thoroughfare; and more than
once be would probably have had to disturb the
slumbers of some yellow dog, dozing away the
hours in the ardent sunshine, and reluctantly
yielding up his place in the middle of the dusty
road.

On Saturdays the village presented a
somewhat livelier appearance, and the shade
trees around the court house square and along
Front Street served as hitching-posts for a
goodly number of horses and mules and stunted
oxen, belonging to the farmer-folk
who had come in to trade at the two or three
local stores.

A murder was a rare event in Branson County.
Every well-informed citizen could tell the number
of homicides committed in the county for fifty
years back, and whether the slayer, in any given
instance, had escaped either by flight or acquittal,
or had suffered the penalty of the law. So, when it
became known in Troy early one Friday morning
in summer, about ten years after the war, that old
Captain Walker, who had served in Mexico
under Scott, and had left an arm on the field of
Gettysburg, had been foully murdered during the
night, there was intense excitement in the village.
Business was practically suspended, and the
citizens gathered in little groups to discuss the
murder, and speculate upon the identity of the
murderer. It transpired from testimony at the
coroner's inquest, held during the morning, that a
strange mulatto had been seen going in the
direction of Captain Walker's house the night
before, and had been met going away from Troy
early Friday morning, by a farmer on his way to
town. Other circumstances seemed to connect the
stranger with the crime. The sheriff
organized a posse to search for him, and early in
the evening, when most of the citizens of Troy
were at supper, the suspected man was brought
in and lodged in the county jail.

By the following morning the news of the
capture had spread to the farthest limits of the
county. A much larger number of people than
usual came to town that Saturday, - bearded
men in straw hats and blue homespun shirts, and
butternut trousers of great amplitude of material
and vagueness of outline; women in homespun
frocks and slat-bonnets, with faces as
expressionless as the dreary sandhills which gave
them a meagre sustenance.

The murder was almost the sole topic of
conversation. A steady stream of curious
observers visited the house of mourning, and
gazed upon the rugged face of the old veteran,
now stiff and cold in death; and more than one
eye dropped a tear at the remembrance of the
cheery smile, and the joke - sometimes superannuated,
generally feeble, but always good-natured - with
which the captain had been wont to greet his
acquaintances. There was a growing sentiment of anger
among these stern men, toward the murderer who
had thus cut down their friend, and a strong
feeling that ordinary justice was too slight a
punishment for such a crime.

Toward noon there was an informal gathering
of citizens in Dan Tyson's store.

“Hit 's the durndes', meanes' murder ever
committed in this caounty,” said another, with
moody emphasis.

“I s'pose the nigger 'lowed the Cap'n had
some greenbacks,” observed a third speaker.

“The Cap'n,” said another, with an air of
superior information, “has left two bairls of
Confedrit money, which he 'spected 'ud be good
some day er nuther.”

This statement gave rise to a discussion of the
speculative value of Confederate money; but in a
little while the conversation returned to the
murder.

“Hangin' air too good fer the murderer,” said
one; “he oughter be burnt, stidier bein' hung.”

There was an impressive pause at this point,
during which a jug of moonlight whiskey went the
round of the crowd.

“Well,” said a round-shouldered farmer, who,
in spite of his peaceable expression and faded
gray eye, was known to have been one of the
most daring followers of a rebel guerrilla
chieftain, “what air yer gwine ter do about it? Ef
you fellers air gwine ter set down an' let a
wuthless nigger kill the bes' white man in
Branson, an' not say nuthin' ner do nuthin', I 'll
move outen the caounty.”

This speech gave tone and direction to the rest
of the conversation. Whether the fear of losing the
round-shouldered farmer operated to bring about
the result or not is immaterial to this narrative; but,
at all events, the crowd decided to lynch the
negro. They agreed that this was the least that
could be done to avenge the death of their
murdered friend, and that it was a becoming way
in which to honor his memory. They had some
vague notions of the majesty of the law and the
rights of the citizen, but in the passion of the
moment these sunk into oblivion; a white man had
been killed by a negro.

“The Cap'n was an ole sodger,” said one
of his friends solemnly. “He 'll sleep better
when he knows that a co'te-martial has be'n hilt
an' jestice done.”

By agreement the lynchers were to meet at
Tyson's store at five o'clock in the afternoon, and
proceed thence to the jail, which was situated
down the Lumberton Dirt Road (as the old
turnpike antedating the plank-road was called),
about half a mile south of the court-house. When
the preliminaries of the lynching had been
arranged, and a committee appointed to manage
the affair, the crowd dispersed, some to go to
their dinners, and some to secure recruits for the
lynching party.

It was twenty minutes to five o'clock, when an
excited negro, panting and perspiring, rushed up
to the back door of Sheriff Campbell's dwelling,
which stood at a little distance from the jail and
somewhat farther than the latter building from the
court-house. A turbaned colored woman came
to the door in response to the negro's knock.

“Hoddy, Sis' Nance.”

“Hoddy, Brer Sam.”

“Is de shurff in,” inquired the negro.

“Yas, Brer Sam, he's eatin' his dinner,” was
the answer.

“Will yer ax 'im ter step ter de do' a minute,
Sis' Nance?”

The woman went into the dining-room, and a
moment later the sheriff came to the door. He
was a tall, muscular man, of a ruddier complexion
than is usual among Southerners. A pair of keen,
deep-set gray eyes looked out from under bushy
eyebrows, and about his mouth was a masterful
expression, which a full beard, once sandy in
color, but now profusely sprinkled with gray,
could not entirely conceal. The day was hot; the
sheriff had discarded his coat and vest, and had
his white shirt open at the throat.

“What do you want, Sam?” he inquired of
the negro, who stood hat in hand, wiping the
moisture from his face with a ragged shirt-sleeve.

“Shurff, dey gwine ter hang de pris'ner w'at's
lock' up in de jail. Dey 're comin' dis a-way now.
I wuz layin' down on a sack er corn down at de
sto', behine a pile er flourbairls, w'en I hearn
Doc' Cain en Kunnel Wright talkin' erbout it. I
slip' outen de back do', en run here as fas' as I
could. I hearn you say down ter de sto' once't
dat you would n't let nobody take a pris'ner 'way
fum you widout walkin' over yo' dead body, en I
thought I'd let you know 'fo' dey come, so yer
could pertec' de pris'ner.”

The sheriff listened calmly, but his face grew
firmer, and a determined gleam lit up his gray
eyes. His frame grew more erect, and he
unconsciously assumed the attitude of a soldier
who momentarily expects to meet the enemy face
to face.

A moment later Nancy brought him a huge
sandwich of split corn-pone, with a thick slice of
fat bacon inserted between the halves, and a
couple of baked yams. The negro hastily
replaced his ragged hat on his head, dropped the
yams in the pocket of his capacious trousers,
and, taking the sandwich in his hand, hurried
across the road and disappeared in the woods
beyond.

The sheriff reëntered the house, and put on his
coat and hat. He then took down a double-barreled
shotgun and loaded it with buckshot.
Filling the chambers of a revolver with fresh
cartridges, he slipped it into the pocket of the
sack-coat which he wore.

A comely young woman in a calico dress
watched these proceedings with anxious surprise.

“Where are you going, father?” she asked.
She had not heard the conversation with the
negro.

“I am goin' over to the jail,” responded the
sheriff. “There's a mob comin' this way
to lynch the nigger we've got locked up. But they
won't do it,” he added, with emphasis.

“Oh, father! don't go!” pleaded the girl,
clinging to his arm; “they'll shoot you if you don't
give him up.”

“You never mind me, Polly,” said her father
reassuringly, as he gently unclasped her hands
from his arm. “ I'll take care of myself and the
prisoner, too. There ain't a man in Branson
County that would shoot me. Besides, I have
faced fire too often to be scared away from my
duty. You keep close in the house,” he continued,
“and if any one disturbs you just use the old
horse-pistol in the top bureau drawer. It 's a little
old-fashioned, but it did good work a few years
ago.”

The young girl shuddered at this sanguinary
allusion, but made no further objection to her
father's departure.

The sheriff of Branson was a man far above
the average of the community in wealth, education,
and social position. His had been one of the few
families in the county that before the war had
owned large estates and numerous slaves. He had
graduated at the State University at Chapel Hill,
and had kept up some acquaintance with current
literature and advanced thought. He had traveled
some in his youth, and was looked up to in the
county as an authority on all subjects connected
with the outer world. At first an ardent supporter
of the Union, he had opposed the secession
movement in his native State as long as opposition
availed to stem the tide of public opinion. Yielding
at last to the force of circumstances, he had
entered the Confederate service rather late in the
war, and served with distinction through several
campaigns, rising in time to the rank of colonel.
After the war he had taken the oath of allegiance,
and had been chosen by the people as the most
available candidate for the office of sheriff, to
which he had been elected without opposition.
He had filled the office for several terms, and was
universally popular with his constituents.

Colonel or Sheriff Campbell, as he was
indifferently called, as the military or civil title
happened to be most important in the opinion of
the person addressing him, had a high sense of
the responsibility attaching to his office. He had
sworn to do his duty faithfully, and he knew
what his duty was, as
sheriff, perhaps more clearly than he had
apprehended it in other passages of his life. It was,
therefore, with no uncertainty in regard to his
course that he prepared his weapons and went
over to the jail. He had no fears for Polly's safety.

The sheriff had just locked the heavy front
door of the jail behind him when a half dozen
horsemen, followed by a crowd of men on foot,
came round a bend in the road and drew near the
jail. They halted in front of the picket fence that
surrounded the building, while several of the
committee of arrangements rode on a few rods
farther to the sheriff's house. One of them
dismounted and rapped on the door with his
riding-whip.

“Is the sheriff at home?” he inquired.

“No, he has just gone out,” replied Polly, who
had come to the door.

“We want the jail keys,” he continued.

“They are not here,” said Polly. “The sheriff
has them himself.” Then she added, with assumed
indifference, “He is at the jail now.”

The man turned away, and Polly went into the
front room, from which she peered anxiously
between the slats of the green blinds
of a window that looked toward the jail.
Meanwhile the messenger returned to his
companions and announced his discovery. It
looked as though the sheriff had learned of their
design and was preparing to resist it.

One of them stepped forward and rapped on
the jail door.

“Well, what is it?” said the sheriff, from
within.

“We want to talk to you, Sheriff,” replied the
spokesman.

There was a little wicket in the door; this the
sheriff opened, and answered through it.

“All right, boys, talk away. You are all
strangers to me, and I don't know what business
you can have.” The sheriff did not think it
necessary to recognize anybody in particular on
such an occasion; the question of identity
sometimes comes up in the investigation of these
extra-judicial executions.

“We're a committee of citizens and we want
to get into the jail.”

“What for? It ain't much trouble to get into
jail. Most people want to keep out.”

The mob was in no humor to appreciate a
joke, and the sheriffs witticism fell dead upon an
unresponsive audience.

“We want to have a talk with the nigger that
killed Cap'n Walker.”

“You can talk to that nigger in the courthouse,
when he 's brought out for trial. Court will be in
session here next week. I know what you fellows
want, but you can't get my prisoner to-day. Do
you want to take the bread out of a poor man's
mouth? I get seventy-five cents a day for keeping
this prisoner, and he 's the only one in jail. I can't
have my family suffer just to please you fellows.”

One or two young men in the crowd laughed
at the idea of Sheriff Campbell's suffering for
want of seventy-five cents a day; but they were
frowned into silence by those who stood near
them.

“Ef yer don't let us in,” cried a voice, “we'll
bu's' the do' open.”

“Bust away,” answered the sheriff, raising his
voice so that all could hear. “But I give you fair
warning. The first man that tries it will be filled
with buckshot. I'm sheriff of this county; I know
my duty, and I mean to do it.”

“What's the use of kicking, Sheriff?” argued
one of the leaders of the mob. “The
nigger is sure to hang anyhow; he richly deserves
it; and we 've got to do something to teach the
niggers their places, or white people won't be
able to live in the county.”

“There 's no use talking, boys,” responded the
sheriff. “I'm a white man outside, but in this jail
I'm sheriff; and if this nigger 's to be hung in this
county, I propose to do the hanging. So you
fellows might as well right-about-face, and march
back to Troy. You've had a pleasant trip, and the
exercise will be good for you. You know me. I've
got powder and ball, and I've faced fire before
now, with nothing between me and the enemy,
and I don't mean to surrender this jail while I 'm
able to shoot.” Having thus announced his
determination, the sheriff closed and fastened the
wicket, and looked around for the best position
from which to defend the building.

The crowd drew off a little, and the leaders
conversed together in low tones.

The Branson County jail was a small, two-story
brick building, strongly constructed, with no
attempt at architectural ornamentation. Each
story was divided into two large cells by a
passage running from front to rear.

“WE'LL BU'S' THE DO' OPEN”

A grated iron door gave entrance from the
passage to each of the four cells. The jail seldom
had many prisoners in it, and the lower windows
had been boarded up. When the sheriff had
closed the wicket, he ascended the steep
wooden stairs to the upper floor. There was no
window at the front of the upper passage, and the
most available position from which to watch the
movements of the crowd below was the front
window of the cell occupied by the solitary
prisoner.

The sheriff unlocked the door and entered the
cell. The prisoner was crouched in a corner, his
yellow face, blanched with terror, looking ghastly
in the semi-darkness of the room. A cold
perspiration had gathered on his forehead, and
his teeth were chattering with affright.

The sheriff glanced at the cowering wretch
with a look of mingled contempt and loathing.

“Get up,” he said sharply. “You will probably
be hung sooner or later, but it shall not be to-day,
if I can help it. I 'll unlock your fetters, and if I
can't hold the jail, you 'll
have to make the best fight you can. If I'm shot,
I'll consider my responsibility at an end.”

There were iron fetters on the prisoner's
ankles, and handcuffs on his wrists. These the
sheriff unlocked, and they fell clanking to the
floor.

“Keep back from the window,” said the
sheriff. “They might shoot if they saw you.”

The sheriff drew toward the window a pine
bench which formed a part of the scanty furniture
of the cell, and laid his revolver upon it. Then he
took his gun in hand, and took his stand at the
side of the window where he could with least
exposure of himself watch the movements of the
crowd below.

The lynchers had not anticipated any
determined resistance. Of course they had
looked for a formal protest, and perhaps a
sufficient show of opposition to excuse the sheriff
in the eye of any stickler for legal formalities.
They had not however come prepared to fight a
battle, and no one of them seemed willing to lead
an attack upon the jail. The leaders of the party
conferred together with a good deal of animated
gesticulation, which was visible to the sheriff from
his outlook,
though the distance was too great for him to hear
what was said. At length one of them broke
away from the group, and rode back to the main
body of the lynchers, who were restlessly
awaiting orders.

“Well, boys,” said the messenger, “we'll have
to let it go for the present. The sheriff says he'll
shoot, and he's got the drop on us this time.
There ain't any of us that want to follow Cap'n
Walker jest yet. Besides, the sheriff is a good
fellow, and we don't want to hurt 'im. But,” he
added, as if to reassure the crowd, which began
to show signs of disappointment, “the nigger
might as well say his prayers, for he ain't got long
to live.”

There was a murmur of dissent from the mob,
and several voices insisted that an attack be
made on the jail. But pacific counsels finally
prevailed, and the mob sullenly withdrew.

The sheriff stood at the window until they had
disappeared around the bend in the road. He did
not relax his watchfulness when the last one was
out of sight. Their withdrawal might be a mere
feint, to be followed by a further attempt. So
closely, indeed, was his attention drawn to the
outside, that he neither
saw nor heard the prisoner creep stealthily
across the floor, reach out his hand and secure
the revolver which lay on the bench behind the
sheriff, and creep as noiselessly back to his place
in the corner of the room.

A moment after the last of the lynching party
had disappeared there was a shot fired from the
woods across the road; a bullet whistled by the
window and buried itself in the wooden casing a
few inches from where the sheriff was standing.
Quick as thought, with the instinct born of a
semi-guerrilla army experience, he raised his gun and
fired twice at the point from which a faint puff of
smoke showed the hostile bullet to have been
sent. He stood a moment watching, and then
rested his gun against the window, and reached
behind him mechanically for the other weapon. It
was not on the bench. As the sheriff realized this
fact, he turned his head and looked into the
muzzle of the revolver.

“Stay where you are, Sheriff,” said the
prisoner, his eyes glistening, his face almost
ruddy with excitement.

The sheriff mentally cursed his own carelessness
for allowing him to be caught in such
a predicament. He had not expected anything
of the kind. He had relied on the negro's
cowardice and subordination in the presence of
an armed white man as a matter of course. The
sheriff was a brave man, but realized that the
prisoner had him at an immense disadvantage.
The two men stood thus for a moment, fighting a
harmless duel with their eyes.

“Well, what do you mean to do?” asked the
sheriff with apparent calmness.

“To get away, of course,” said the prisoner, in
a tone which caused the sheriff to look at him
more closely, and with an involuntary feeling of
apprehension; if the man was not mad, he was in
a state of mind akin to madness, and quite as
dangerous. The sheriff felt that he must speak the
prisoner fair, and watch for a chance to turn the
tables on him. The keen-eyed, desperate man
before him was a different being altogether from
the groveling wretch who had begged so
piteously for life a few minutes before.

At length the sheriff spoke: -

“Is this your gratitude to me for saving your life
at the risk of my own? If I had not done so, you
would now be swinging from the limb of some
neighboring tree.”

“True,” said the prisoner, “you saved my
life, but for how long? When you came in, you
said Court would sit next week. When the crowd
went away they said I had not long to live. It is
merely a choice of two ropes.”

“While there's life there's hope,” replied the
sheriff. He uttered this commonplace mechanically,
while his brain was busy in trying to think out
some way of escape. “If you are innocent you
can prove it.”

The mulatto kept his eye upon the sheriff. “I
didn't kill the old man,” he replied; “but I shall
never be able to clear myself. I was at his house
at nine o'clock. I stole from it the coat that was
on my back when I was taken. I would be
convicted, even with a fair trial, unless the real
murderer were discovered beforehand.”

The sheriff knew this only too well. While he
was thinking what argument next to use, the
prisoner continued: -

“Throw me the keys - no, unlock the door.”

The sheriff stood a moment irresolute. The
mulatto's eye glittered ominously. The sheriff
crossed the room and unlocked the door leading
into the passage.

“Now go down and unlock the outside door.”

The heart of the sheriff leaped within him.
Perhaps he might make a dash for liberty, and
gain the outside. He descended the narrow stairs,
the prisoner keeping close behind him.

The sheriff inserted the huge iron key into the
lock. The rusty bolt yielded slowly. It still
remained for him to pull the door open.

“Stop!” thundered the mulatto, who seemed
to divine the sheriff's purpose. “Move a muscle,
and I 'll blow your brains out.”

The sheriff obeyed; he realized that his chance
had not yet come.

“Now keep on that side of the passage, and
go back upstairs.”

Keeping the sheriff under cover of the
revolver, the mulatto followed him up the stairs.
The sheriff expected the prisoner to lock him into
the cell and make his own escape. He had about
come to the conclusion that the best thing he
could do under the circumstances was to submit
quietly, and take his chances of recapturing the
prisoner after the alarm had been given. The
sheriff had faced death more than once upon the
battlefield. A few minutes before, well armed, and
with a brick wall between him and them he had dared a
hundred men to fight; but he felt instinctively that
the desperate man confronting him was not to be
trifled with, and he was too prudent a man to risk
his life against such heavy odds. He had Polly to
look after, and there was a limit beyond which
devotion to duty would be quixotic and even
foolish.

“I want to get away,” said the prisoner, “and I
don't want to be captured; for if I am I know I will
be hung on the spot. I am afraid,” he added
somewhat reflectively, “that in order to save
myself I shall have to kill you.”

“Good God!” exclaimed the sheriff in involuntary
terror; “you would not kill the man to whom you
owe your own life.”

“You speak more truly than you know,” replied
the mulatto. “I indeed owe my life to you.”

The sheriff started. He was capable of surprise,
even in that moment of extreme peril. “Who are
you?” he asked in amazement.

“Tom, Cicely's son,” returned the other. He had
closed the door and stood talking to the sheriff
through the grated opening. “Don't you remember
Cicely - Cicely whom
you sold, with her child, to the speculator on his
way to Alabama?”

The sheriff did remember. He had been sorry
for it many a time since. It had been the old story
of debts, mortgages, and bad crops. He had
quarreled with the mother. The price offered for
her and her child had been unusually large, and he
had yielded to the combination of anger and
pecuniary stress.

“Good God!” he gasped, “you would not
murder your own father?”

“My father?” replied the mulatto. “It were well
enough for me to claim the relationship, but it
comes with poor grace from you to ask anything
by reason of it. What father's duty have you ever
performed for me? Did you give me your name, or
even your protection? Other white men gave their
colored sons freedom and money, and sent them
to the free States. You sold
me to the rice swamps.”

“I at least gave you the life you cling to,”
murmured the sheriff.

“Life?” said the prisoner, with a sarcastic
laugh. “What kind of a life? You gave me your
own blood, your own features, - no
man need look at us together twice to see
that, - and you gave me a black mother. Poor
wretch! She died under the lash, because she
had enough womanhood to call her soul her own.
You gave me a white man's spirit, and you made
me a slave, and crushed it out.”

“But you are free now,” said the sheriff. He
had not doubted, could not doubt, the mulatto's
word. He knew whose passions coursed beneath
that swarthy skin and burned in the black eyes
opposite his own. He saw in this mulatto what he
himself might have become had not the
safeguards of parental restraint and public
opinion been thrown around him.

“Free to do what?” replied the mulatto. “Free
in name, but despised and scorned and set aside
by the people to whose race I belong far more
than to my mother's.”

“There are schools,” said the sheriff. “You
have been to school.” He had noticed that the
mulatto spoke more eloquently and used better
language than most Branson County people.

“I have been to school, and dreamed when I
went that it would work some marvelous
change in my condition. But what did I learn? I
learned to feel that no degree of learning or
wisdom will change the color of my skin and that
I shall always wear what in my own country is a
badge of degradation. When I think about it
seriously I do not care particularly for such a life.
It is the animal in me, not the man, that flees the
gallows. I owe you nothing,” he went on, “and
expect nothing of you; and it would be no more
than justice if I should avenge upon you my
mother's wrongs and my own. But still I hate to
shoot you; I have never yet taken human life - for
I did notkill the old captain. Will you promise to
give no alarm and make no attempt to capture me
until morning, if I do not shoot?”

So absorbed were the two men in their colloquy and
their own tumultuous thoughts that neither of
them had heard the door below move upon its
hinges. Neither of them had heard a light
step come stealthily up the stairs, nor seen a
slender form creep along the darkening passage
toward the mulatto.

The sheriff hesitated. The struggle between his
love of life and his sense of duty was a terrific
one. It may seem strange that
a man who could sell his own child into slavery
should hesitate at such a moment, when his life
was trembling in the balance. But the baleful
influence of human slavery poisoned the very
fountains of life, and created new standards of
right. The sheriff was conscientious; his
conscience had merely been warped by his
environment. Let no one ask what his answer
would have been; he was spared the necessity of
a decision.

“Stop,” said the mulatto, “you need not
promise. I could not trust you if you did. It is your
life for mine; there is but one safe way for me;
you must die.”

He raised his arm to fire, when there was a
flash - a report from the passage behind him. His
arm fell heavily at his side, and the pistol dropped
at his feet.

The sheriff recovered first from his surprise,
and throwing open the door secured the fallen
weapon. Then seizing the prisoner he thrust him
into the cell and locked the door upon him; after
which he turned to Polly, who leaned half-fainting
against the wall, her hands clasped over her heart.

“Oh, father, I was just in time!” she cried
hysterically, and, wildly sobbing, threw herself
into her father's arms.

“I watched until they all went away,” she
said. “I heard the shot from the woods and I saw
you shoot. Then when you did not come out I
feared something had happened, that perhaps
you had been wounded. I got out the other pistol
and ran over here. When I found the door open,
I knew something was wrong, and when I heard
voices I crept up stairs, and reached the top just
in time to hear him say he would kill you. Oh, it
was a narrow escape!”

When she had grown somewhat calmer, the
sheriff left her standing there and went back into
the cell. The prisoner's arm was bleeding from a
flesh wound. His bravado had given place to a
stony apathy. There was no sign in his face of
fear or disappointment or feeling of any kind. The
sheriff sent Polly to the house for cloth, and
bound up the prisoner's wound with a rude skill
acquired during his army life.

“I'll have a doctor come and dress the wound
in the morning,” he said to the prisoner. “It will do
very well until then, if you will keep quiet. If the
doctor asks you how the wound was caused,
you can say that you were struck by the bullet
fired from the
woods. It would do you no good to have
known that you were shot while attempting to
escape.”

The prisoner uttered no word of thanks or
apology, but sat in sullen silence. When the
wounded arm had been bandaged, Polly and her
father returned to the house.

The sheriff was in an unusually thoughtful
mood that evening. He put salt in his coffee at
supper, and poured vinegar over his pancakes.
To many of Polly's questions he returned random
answers. When he had gone to bed he lay awake
for several hours.

In the silent watches of the night, when he was
alone with God, there came into his mind a flood
of unaccustomed thoughts. An hour or two
before, standing face to face with death, he had
experienced a sensation similar to that which
drowning men are said to feel - a kind of
clarifying of the moral faculty, in which the veil of
the flesh, with its obscuring passions and
prejudices, is pushed aside for a moment, and all
the acts of one's life stand out, in the clear light of
truth, in their correct proportions and relations, - a
state of mind in which one sees himself as God may
be supposed to see him. In the reaction
following his rescue, this feeling had given place for
a time to far different emotions. But now, in the
silence of midnight, something of this clearness of
spirit returned to the sheriff. He saw that he had
owed some duty to this son of his, - that neither
law nor custom could destroy a responsibility
inherent in the nature of mankind. He could not
thus, in the eyes of God at least, shake off the
consequences of his sin. Had he never sinned, this
wayward spirit would never have come back from
the vanished past to haunt him. As these thoughts
came, his anger against the mulatto died away, and
in its place there sprang up a great pity. The hand
of parental authority might have restrained the
passions he had seen burning in the prisoner's eyes
when the desperate man spoke the words which
had seemed to doom his father to death. The
sheriff felt that he might have saved this fiery spirit
from the slough of slavery; that he might have sent
him to the free North, and given him there, or in
some other land, an opportunity to turn to
usefulness and honorable pursuits the talents that
had run to crime, perhaps to madness; he might,
still less, have given this son of his the poor simulacrum of
liberty which men of his caste could possess in a
slave-holding community; or least of all, but still
something, he might have kept the boy on the
plantation, where the burdens of slavery would
have fallen lightly upon him.

The sheriff recalled his own youth. He had
inherited an honored name to keep untarnished;
he had had a future to make; the picture of a fair
young bride had beckoned him on to happiness.
The poor wretch now stretched upon a pallet of
straw between the brick walls of the jail had had
none of these things, - no name, no father, no
mother - in the true meaning of motherhood, - and
until the past few years no possible future, and
then one vague and shadowy in its outline, and
dependent for form and substance upon the slow
solution of a problem in which there were many
unknown quantities.

From what he might have done to what he
might yet do was an easy transition for the
awakened conscience of the sheriff. It occurred
to him, purely as a hypothesis, that he might
permit his prisoner to escape; but his oath of
office, his duty as sheriff, stood in the way of such
a course, and the sheriff dismissed the idea from
his mind. He could, however, investigate the
circumstances of the
murder, and move Heaven and earth to discover
the real criminal, for he no longer doubted the
prisoner's innocence; he could employ counsel for
the accused, and perhaps influence public opinion
in his favor. An acquittal once secured, some plan
could be devised by which the sheriff might in
some degree atone for his crime against this son
of his - against society - against God.

When the sheriff had reached this conclusion
he fell into an unquiet slumber, from which he
awoke late the next morning.

He went over to the jail before breakfast and
found the prisoner lying on his pallet, his face
turned to the wall; he did not move when the
sheriff rattled the door.

“Good-morning,” said the latter, in a tone
intended to waken the prisoner.

There was no response. The sheriff looked
more keenly at the recumbent figure; there was
an unnatural rigidity about its attitude.

He hastily unlocked the door and, entering the
cell, bent over the prostrate form. There was no
sound of breathing; he turned the body over - it
was cold and stiff. The prisoner had torn the
bandage from his wound and bled to death during
the night. He had evidently been dead several
hours.

A MATTER OF PRINCIPLE
I

“WHAT our country needs most in its
treatment of the race problem,” observed Mr.
Cicero Clayton at one of the monthly meetings of
the Blue Vein Society, of which he was a
prominent member, “is a clearer conception of
the brotherhood of man.”

The same sentiment in much the same words
had often fallen from Mr. Clayton's lips, - so
often, in fact, that the younger members of the
society sometimes spoke of him - among
themselves of course - as “Brotherhood
Clayton.” The sobriquet derived its point from
the application he made of the principle involved
in this oft-repeated proposition.

The fundamental article of Mr. Clayton's social
creed was that he himself was not a negro.

“I know,” he would say, “that the white
people lump us all together as negroes, and
condemn us all to the same social ostracism. But I
don't accept this classification, for my part, and I
imagine that, as the chief party in interest, I have a
right to my opinion. People who belong by half or
more of their blood to the most virile and
progressive race of modern times have as much
right to call themselves white as others have to
call them negroes.”

Mr. Clayton spoke warmly, for he was well
informed, and had thought much upon the
subject; too much, indeed, for he had not been
able to escape entirely the tendency of too much
concentration upon one subject to make even the
clearest minds morbid.

“Of course we can't enforce our claims, or
protect ourselves from being robbed of our
birthright; but we can at least have principles, and
try to live up to them the best we can. If we are
not accepted as white, we can at any rate make it
clear that we object to being called black. Our
protest cannot fail in time to impress itself upon
the better class of white people; for the Anglo-Saxon
race loves justice, and will eventually do it,
where it does not conflict with their own
interests.”

Whether or not the fact that Mr. Clayton
meant no sarcasm, and was conscious of no
inconsistency in this eulogy, tended to establish
the racial identity he claimed may safely be left to
the discerning reader.

In living up to his creed Mr. Clayton declined
to associate to any considerable extent with black
people. This was sometimes a little inconvenient,
and occasionally involved a sacrifice of some
pleasure for himself and his family, because they
would not attend entertainments where many
black people were likely to be present. But they
had a social refuge in a little society of people like
themselves; they attended, too, a church, of
which nearly all the members were white, and
they were connected with a number of the
religious and benevolent associations open to all
good citizens, where they came into contact with
the better class of white people, and were
treated, in their capacity of members, with a
courtesy and consideration scarcely different
from that accorded to other citizens.

Mr. Clayton's racial theory was not only
logical enough, but was in his own case backed
up by substantial arguments. He had begun life
with a small patrimony, and had invested his
money in a restaurant, which by careful
and judicious attention had grown from a cheap
eating-house into the most popular and
successful confectionery and catering
establishment in Groveland. His business
occupied a double store on Oakwood Avenue.
He owned houses and lots, and stocks and
bonds, had good credit at the banks, and lived in
a style befitting his income and business standing.
In person he was of olive complexion, with
slightly curly hair. His features approached the
Cuban or Latin-American type rather than the
familiar broad characteristics of the mulatto, this
suggestion of something foreign being heightened
by a Vandyke beard and a carefully waxed and
pointed mustache. When he walked to church on
Sunday mornings with his daughter Alice, they
were a couple of such striking appearance as
surely to attract attention.

Miss Alice Clayton was queen of her social
set. She was young, she was handsome. She was
nearly white; she frankly confessed her sorrow
that she was not entirely so. She was
accomplished and amiable, dressed in good
taste, and had for her father by all odds the
richest colored man - the term is used with
apologies to Mr. Clayton, explaining that it
does not necessarily mean a negro - in
Groveland. So pronounced was her superiority
that really she had but one social rival worthy of
the name, - Miss Lura Watkins, whose father
kept a prosperous livery stable and lived in
almost as good style as the Claytons. Miss
Watkins, while good-looking enough, was not so
young nor quite so white as Miss Clayton. She
was popular, however, among their mutual
acquaintances, and there was a good-natured race
between the two as to which should make the
first and best marriage.

Marriages among Miss Clayton's set were
serious affairs. Of course marriage is always a
serious matter, whether it be a success or a
failure, and there are those who believe that any
marriage is better than no marriage. But among
Miss Clayton's friends and associates matrimony
took on an added seriousness because of the
very narrow limits within which it could take
place. Miss Clayton and her friends, by reason of
their assumed superiority to black people, or
perhaps as much by reason of a somewhat
morbid shrinking from the curiosity manifested
toward married people of strongly contrasting
colors, would not marry black men, and except in
rare instances white
men would not marry them. They were therefore
restricted for a choice to the young men of their
own complexion. But these, unfortunately for the
girls, had a wider choice. In any State where the
laws permit freedom of the marriage contract, a
man, by virtue of his sex, can find a wife of
whatever complexion he prefers; of course he
must not always ask too much in other respects,
for most women like to better their social position
when they marry. To the number thus lost by
“going on the other side,” as the phrase went, add
the worthless contingent whom no self-respecting
woman would marry, and the choice was still
further restricted; so that it had become
fashionable, when the supply of eligible men ran
short, for those of Miss Clayton's set who could
afford it to go traveling, ostensibly for pleasure,
but with the serious hope that they might meet
their fate away from home.

Miss Clayton had perhaps a larger option than
any of her associates. Among such men as there
were she could have taken her choice. Her
beauty, her position, her accomplishments, her
father's wealth, all made her eminently desirable.
But, on the other hand, the same things rendered
her more difficult to reach, and
harder to please. To get access to her heart, too,
it was necessary to run the gauntlet of her
parents, which, until she had reached the age of
twenty-three, no one had succeeded in doing
safely. Many had called, but none had been
chosen.

There was, however, one spot left unguarded,
and through it Cupid, a veteran sharpshooter,
sent a dart. Mr. Clayton had taken into his
service and into his household a poor relation, a
sort of cousin several times removed. This
boy - his name was Jack - had gone into Mr.
Clayton's service at a very youthful age, - twelve
or thirteen. He had helped about the housework,
washed the dishes, swept the floors, taken care
of the lawn and the stable for three or four years,
while he attended school. His cousin had then
taken him into the store, where he had swept the
floor, washed the windows, and done a class of
work that kept fully impressed upon him the fact
that he was a poor dependent. Nevertheless he
was a cheerful lad, who took what he could get
and was properly grateful, but always meant to
get more. By sheer force of industry and affability
and shrewdness, he forced his employer to
promote him in time
to a position of recognized authority in the
establishment. Any one outside of the family
would have perceived in him a very suitable
husband for Miss Clayton; he was of about the
same age, or a year or two older, was as fair of
complexion as she, when she was not powdered,
and was passably good-looking, with a bearing of
which the natural manliness had been no more
warped than his training and racial status had
rendered inevitable; for he had early learned the
law of growth, that to bend is better than to
break. He was sometimes sent to accompany
Miss Clayton to places in the evening, when she
had no other escort, and it is quite likely that she
discovered his good points before her parents
did. That they should in time perceive them was
inevitable. But even then, so accustomed were
they to looking down upon the object of their
former bounty, that they only spoke of the matter
jocularly.

“Well, Alice,” her father would say in his bluff
way, “you'll not be absolutely obliged to die an
old maid. If we can't find anything better for you,
there 's always Jack. As long as he does n't take
to some other girl, you can fall back on him as a
last chance. He 'd be glad to take you to get into
the business.”

Miss Alice had considered the joke a very
poor one when first made, but by occasional
repetition she became somewhat familiar with it.
In time it got around to Jack himself, to whom it
seemed no joke at all. He had long considered it
a consummation devoutly to be wished, and
when he became aware that the possibility of
such a match had occurred to the other parties in
interest, he made up his mind that the idea should
in due course of time become an accomplished
fact. He had even suggested as much to Alice, in
a casual way, to feel his ground; and while she
had treated the matter lightly, he was not without
hope that she had been impressed by the
suggestion. Before he had had time, however, to
follow up this lead, Miss Clayton, in the spring of
187-, went away on a visit to Washington.

The occasion of her visit was a presidential
inauguration. The new President owed his
nomination mainly to the votes of the Southern
delegates in the convention, and was believed to
be correspondingly well disposed to the race
from which the Southern delegates were for the
most part recruited. Friends of rival and
unsuccessful candidates for the nomination had
more than hinted that the
Southern delegates were very substantially
rewarded for their support at the time when it
was given; whether this was true or not the
parties concerned know best. At any rate the
colored politicians did not see it in that light, for
they were gathered from near and far to press
their claims for recognition and patronage. On the
evening following the White House inaugural ball,
the colored people of Washington gave an
“inaugural” ball at a large public hall. It was under
the management of their leading citizens, among
them several high officials holding over from the
last administration, and a number of professional
and business men. This ball was the most
noteworthy social event that colored circles up to
that time had ever known. There were many
visitors from various parts of the country. Miss
Clayton attended the ball, the honors of which
she carried away easily. She danced with several
partners, and was introduced to innumerable
people whom she had never seen before, and
whom she hardly expected ever to meet again.
She went away from the ball, at four o'clock in
the morning, in a glow of triumph, and with a
confused impression of senators and
representatives and
lawyers and doctors of all shades, who had
sought an introduction, led her through the dance,
and overwhelmed her with compliments. She
returned home the next day but one, after the
most delightful week of her life.

II

One afternoon, about three weeks after her
return from Washington, Alice received a letter
through the mail. The envelope bore the words
“House of Representatives” printed in one
corner, and in the opposite corner, in a bold
running hand, a Congressman's frank, “Hamilton
M. Brown, M. C.” The letter read as follows: -

DEAR FRIEND (if I may be permitted to call
you so after so brief an acquaintance), - I
remember with sincerest pleasure our recent
meeting at the inaugural ball, and the sensation
created by your beauty, your amiable manners,
and your graceful dancing. Time has so
strengthened the impression I then received, that
I should have felt inconsolable
had I thought it impossible ever to again behold
the charms which had brightened the occasion of
our meeting and eclipsed by their brilliancy the
leading belles of the capital. I had hoped,
however, to have the pleasure of meeting you
again, and circumstances have fortunately placed
it in my power to do so at an early date. You
have doubtless learned that the contest over the
election in the Sixth Congressional District of
South Carolina has been decided in my favor, and
that I now have the honor of representing my
native State at the national capital. I have just
been appointed a member of a special committee
to visit and inspect the Sault River and the Straits
of Mackinac, with reference to the needs of lake
navigation. I have made arrangements to start a
week ahead of the other members of the
committee, whom I am to meet in Detroit on the
20th. I shall leave here on the 2d, and will arrive
in Groveland on the 3d, by the 7.30 evening
express. I shall remain in Groveland several days,
in the course of which I shall be pleased to call,
and renew the acquaintance so auspiciously
begun in Washington, which it is my fondest hope
may ripen into a warmer friendship.

If you do not regard my visit as presumptuous,
and do not write me in the mean while forbidding
it, I shall do myself the pleasure of waiting on you
the morning after my arrival in Groveland.

With renewed expressions of my sincere
admiration and profound esteem, I remain,

Sincerely yours,HAMILTON M. BROWN, M.C.

To Alice, and especially to her mother, this
bold and flowery letter had very nearly the force
of a formal declaration. They read it over again
and again, and spent most of the afternoon
discussing it. There were few young men in
Groveland eligible as husbands for so superior a
person as Alice Clayton, and an addition to the
number would be very acceptable. But the mere
fact of his being a Congressman was not
sufficient to qualify him; there were other
considerations.

“I've never heard of this Honorable Hamilton
M. Brown,” said Mr. Clayton. The letter had
been laid before him at the supper-table. “It 's
strange, Alice, that you have n't said anything
about him before. You must have met lots of
swell folks not to recollect a Congressman.”

“But he was n't a Congressman then,”
answered Alice; “he was only a claimant. I
remember Senator Bruce, and Mr. Douglass; but
there were so many doctors and lawyers and
politicians that I could n't keep track of them all.
Still I have a faint impression of a Mr. Brown
who danced with me.”

She went into the parlor and brought out the
dancing programme she had used at the
Washington ball. She had decorated it with a
bow of blue ribbon and preserved it as a
souvenir of her visit.

“Yes,” she said, after examining it, “I must
have danced with him. Here are the initials - ‘H. M. B.’ ”

“What color is he?” asked Mr. Clayton, as
he plied his knife and fork.

“I have a notion that he was rather
dark - darker than any one I had ever danced
with before.”

“Why did you dance with him?” asked her
father. “You weren't obliged to go back on your
principles because you were away from home.”

“Well, father, ‘when you're in Rome’ - you
know the rest. Mrs. Clearweather introduced
me to several dark men, to him
among others. They were her friends, and
common decency required me to be courteous.”

“If this man is black, we don't want to
encourage him. If he 's the right sort, we'll
invite him to the house.”

“And make him feel at home,” added Mrs.
Clayton, on hospitable thoughts intent.

“We must ask Sadler about him to-morrow,”
said Mr. Clayton, when he had drunk his coffee
and lighted his cigar. “If he 's the right man he
shall have cause to remember his visit to
Groveland. We'll show him that Washington is
not the only town on earth.”

The uncertainty of the family with regard to
Mr. Brown was soon removed. Mr. Solomon
Sadler, who was supposed to know everything
worth knowing concerning the colored race, and
everybody of importance connected with it,
dropped in after supper to make an evening call.
Sadler was familiar with the history of every man
of negro ancestry who had distinguished himself
in any walk of life. He could give the pedigree of
Alexander Pushkin, the titles of scores of Dumas's
novels (even Sadler had not time to learn them all),
and could recite the whole of Wendell
Phillips's lecture on Toussaint l'Ouverture. He
claimed a personal acquaintance with Mr.
Frederick Douglass, and had been often in
Washington, where he was well known and well
received in good colored society.

“Let me see,” he said reflectively, when asked
for information about the Honorable Hamilton M.
Brown. “Yes, I think I know him. He studied at
Oberlin just after the war. He was about leaving
there when I entered. There were two H. M.
Browns there - a Hamilton M. Brown and a
Henry M. Brown. One was stout and dark and
the other was slim and quite light; you could
scarcely tell him from a dark white man. They
used to call them ‘light Brown’ and ‘dark
Brown.’ I did n't know either of them except by
sight, for they were there only a few weeks after I
went in. As I remember them, Hamilton was the
fair one - a very good-looking, gentlemanly
fellow, and, as I heard, a good student and a fine
speaker.”

“Do you remember what kind of hair he had?”
asked Mr. Clayton.

“Very good indeed; straight, as I remember it.
He looked something like a Spaniard or a
Portuguese.”

“Now that you describe him,” said Alice,
“I remember quite well dancing with such a
gentleman; and I 'm wrong about my ‘H. M. B.’
The dark man must have been some one else;
there are two others on my card that I can't
remember distinctly, and he was probably one of
those.”

“I guess he 's all right, Alice,” said her father
when Sadler had gone away. “He evidently
means business, and we must treat him white. Of
course he must stay with us; there are no hotels in
Groveland while he is here. Let's see - he'll be
here in three days. That is n't very long, but I
guess we can get ready. I 'll write a letter this
afternoon - or you write it, and invite him to the
house, and say I'll meet him at the depot. And
you may have carte blanche for making the preparations.”

“We must have some people to meet him.”

“Certainly; a reception is the proper thing. Sit
down immediately and write the letter and I'll
mail it first thing in the morning, so he 'll get it
before he has time to make other arrangements.
And you and your mother put your heads
together and make out a list of guests, and I 'll
have the invitations
printed to-morrow. We will show the darkeys of
Groveland how to entertain a Congressman.”

It will be noted that in moments of abstraction
or excitement Mr. Clayton sometimes relapsed
into forms of speech not entirely consistent with
his principles. But some allowance must be made
for his atmosphere; he could no more escape
from it than the leopard can change his spots, or
the - In deference to Mr. Clayton's feelings the
quotation will be left incomplete.

Alice wrote the letter on the spot and it was
duly mailed, and sped on its winged way to
Washington.

The preparations for the reception were made
as thoroughly and elaborately as possible on so
short a notice. The invitations were issued; the
house was cleaned from attic to cellar; an
orchestra was engaged for the evening; elaborate
floral decorations were planned and the flowers
ordered. Even the refreshments, which ordinarily,
in the household of a caterer, would be mere
matter of familiar detail, became a subject of
serious consultation and study.

The approaching event was a matter of
very much interest to the fortunate ones who
were honored with invitations, and this for several
reasons. They were anxious to meet this sole
representative of their race in the - th Congress,
and as he was not one of the old-line colored
leaders, but a new star risen on the political
horizon, there was a special curiosity to see who
he was and what he looked like. Moreover, the
Claytons did not often entertain a large company,
but when they did, it was on a scale
commensurate with their means and position, and
to be present on such an occasion was a thing to
remember and to talk about. And, most
important consideration of all, some remarks
dropped by members of the Clayton family had
given rise to the rumor that the Congressman was
seeking a wife. This invested his visit with a
romantic interest, and gave the reception a
practical value; for there were other marriageable
girls besides Miss Clayton, and if one was left
another might be taken.

III

On the evening of April 3d, at fifteen minutes
of six o'clock, Mr. Clayton, accompanied
by Jack, entered the livery carriage
waiting at his gate and ordered the coachman to
drive to the Union Depot. He had taken Jack
along, partly for company, and partly that Jack
might relieve the Congressman of any trouble
about his baggage, and make himself useful in
case of emergency. Jack was willing enough to
go, for he had foreseen in the visitor a rival for
Alice's hand, - indeed he had heard more or less
of the subject for several days, - and was glad to
make a reconnaissance before the enemy arrived
upon the field of battle. He had made - at least
he had thought so - considerable progress with
Alice during the three weeks since her return
from Washington, and once or twice Alice had
been perilously near the tender stage. This visit
had disturbed the situation and threatened to ruin
his chances; but he did not mean to give up
without a struggle.

Arrived at the main entrance, Mr. Clayton
directed the carriage to wait, and entered the
station with Jack. The Union Depot at Groveland
was an immense oblong structure, covering a
dozen parallel tracks and furnishing terminal
passenger facilities for half a dozen railroads. The
tracks ran east and west, and
the depot was entered from the south, at about
the middle of the building. On either side of the
entrance, the waiting-rooms, refreshment rooms,
baggage and express departments, and other
administrative offices, extended in a row for the
entire length of the building; and beyond them and
parallel with them stretched a long open space,
separated from the tracks by an iron fence or
grille.There were two entrance gates in the
fence, at which tickets must be shown before
access could be had to trains, and two other
gates, by which arriving passengers came out.

Mr. Clayton looked at the blackboard on the
wall underneath the station clock, and observed
that the 7.30 train from Washington was five
minutes late. Accompanied by Jack he walked
up and down the platform until the train, with the
usual accompaniment of panting steam and
clanging bell and rumbling trucks, pulled into the
station, and drew up on the third or fourth track
from the iron railing. Mr. Clayton stationed
himself at the gate nearest the rear end of the
train, reasoning that the Congressman would ride
in a parlor car, and would naturally come out by
the gate nearest the point at which he left the
train.

“You 'd better go and stand by the other
gate, Jack,” he said to his companion, “and stop
him if he goes out that way.”

The train was well filled and a stream of
passengers poured through. Mr. Clayton scanned
the crowd carefully as they approached the gate,
and scrutinized each passenger as he came
through, without seeing any one that met the
description of Congressman Brown, as given by
Sadler, or any one that could in his opinion be the
gentleman for whom he was looking. When the
last one had passed through he was left to the
conclusion that his expected guest had gone out
by the other gate. Mr. Clayton hastened thither.

“Did n't he come out this way, Jack?” he
asked.

“No, sir,” replied the young man, “I have n't
seen him.”

“That 's strange,” mused Mr. Clayton,
somewhat anxiously. “He would hardly fail to
come without giving us notice. Surely we must
have missed him. We'd better look around a
little. You go that way and I 'll go this.”

Mr. Clayton turned and walked several
rods along the platform to the men's
waitingroom, and standing near the door glanced
around to see if he could find the object of his
search. The only colored person in the room was
a stout and very black man, wearing a broadcloth
suit and a silk hat, and seated a short distance
from the door. On the seat by his side
stood a couple of valises. On one of them, the
one nearest him, on which his arm rested, was
written, in white letters, plainly legible, -

“H. M. BROWN, M. C.“Washington, D. C.”

Mr. Clayton's feelings at this discovery can
better be imagined than described. He hastily left
the waiting-room, before the black gentleman,
who was looking the other way, was even aware
of his presence, and, walking rapidly up and
down the platform, communed with himself upon
what course of action the situation demanded.
He had invited to his house, had come down to
meet, had made elaborate preparations to
entertain on the following evening, a light-colored
man, - a white man by his theory, an acceptable
guest, a possible husband for his daughter, an
avowed
suitor for her hand. If the Congressman had
turned out to be brown, even dark brown, with
fairly good hair, though he might not have desired
him as a son-in-law, yet he could have welcomed
him as a guest. But even this softening of the
blow was denied him, for the man in the
waiting-room was palpably, aggressively black,
with pronounced African features and woolly hair,
without apparently a single drop of redeeming
white blood. Could he, in the face of his
well-known principles, his lifelong rule of conduct,
take this negro into his home and introduce him
to his friends? Could he subject his wife and
daughter to the rude shock of such a
disappointment? It would be bad enough for
them to learn of the ghastly mistake, but to have
him in the house would be twisting the arrow in
the wound.

Mr. Clayton had the instincts of a gentleman,
and realized the delicacy of the situation. But to
get out of his difficulty without wounding the
feelings of the Congressman required not only
diplomacy but dispatch. Whatever he did must
be done promptly; for if he waited many minutes
the Congressman would probably take a carriage
and be driven to Mr. Clayton's residence.

A ray of hope came for a moment to illumine
the gloom of the situation. Perhaps the black man
was merely sitting there, and not the owner of the
valise! For there were two valises, one on each
side of the supposed Congressman. For obvious
reasons he did not care to make the inquiry
himself, so he looked around for his companion,
who came up a moment later.

“Jack,” he exclaimed excitedly, “I 'm afraid
we're in the worst kind of a hole, unless there 's
some mistake! Run down to the men's waitingroom
and you 'll see a man and a valise, and
you'll understand what I mean. Ask that darkey if
he is the Honorable Mr. Brown, Congressman
from South Carolina. If he says yes, come back
right away and let me know, without giving him
time to ask any questions, and put your wits to
work to help me out of the scrape.”

“I wonder what 's the matter?” said Jack to
himself, but did as he was told. In a moment he
came running back.

“Yes, sir,” he announced; “he says he's the
man.”

“Jack,” said Mr. Clayton desperately, “if
you want to show your appreciation of what
I 've done for you, you must suggest some way
out of this. I'd never dare to take that negro to
my house, and yet I 'm obliged to treat him like a
gentleman.”

Jack's eyes had worn a somewhat reflective
look since he had gone to make the inquiry.
Suddenly his face brightened with intelligence,
and then, as a newsboy ran into the station calling
his wares, hardened into determination.

“Clarion, special extry 'dition! All about de
epidemic er dipt'eria!” clamored the newsboy
with shrill childish treble, as he made his way
toward the waiting-room. Jack darted after him,
and saw the man to whom he had spoken buy a
paper. He ran back to his employer, and
dragged him over toward the ticket-seller's
window.

“I have it, sir!” he exclaimed, seizing a
telegraph blank and writing rapidly, and reading
aloud as he wrote. “How 's this for a way out?” -

“DEAR SIR, - I write you this note here in
the depot to inform you of an unfortunate event
which has interfered with my plans and those of
my family for your entertainment
while in Groveland. Yesterday my daughter Alice
complained of a sore throat, which by this
afternoon had developed into a case of malignant
diphtheria. In consequence our house has been
quarantined; and while I have felt myself obliged
to come down to the depot, I do not feel that I
ought to expose you to the possibility of
infection, and I therefore send you this by
another hand. The bearer will conduct you to a
carriage which I have ordered placed at your
service, and unless you should prefer some other
hotel, you will be driven to the Forest Hill House,
where I beg you will consider yourself my guest
during your stay in the city, and make the fullest
use of every convenience it may offer. From
present indications I fear no one of our family will
be able to see you, which we shall regret beyond
expression, as we have made elaborate
arrangements for your entertainment. I still hope,
however, that you may enjoy your visit, as there
are many places of interest in the city, and many
friends will doubtless be glad to make your
acquaintance.

“Splendid!” cried Mr. Clayton. “You 've
helped me out of a horrible scrape. Now, go and
take him to the hotel and see him comfortably
located, and tell them to charge the bill to me.”

“I suspect, sir,” suggested Jack, “that I'd
better not go up to the house, and you 'll have
to stay in yourself for a day or two, to keep up
appearances. I'll sleep on the lounge at the store,
and we can talk business over the telephone.”

“All right, Jack, we'll arrange the details
later. But for Heaven's sake get him started, or
he 'll be calling a hack to drive up to the house.
I'll go home on a street car.”

“So far so good,” sighed Mr. Clayton to
himself as he escaped from the station. “Jack is
a deuced clever fellow, and I 'll have to do
something more for him. But the tug-of-war is
yet to come. I 've got to bribe a doctor, shut up
the house for a day or two, and have all the
ill-humor of two disappointed women to endure
until this negro leaves town. Well, I'm sure my
wife and Alice will back me up at any cost. No
sacrifice is too great to escape having to entertain
him; of course I have no prejudice against his
color, - he
can't help that, - but it is the principleof the
thing. If we received him it would be a
concession fatal to all my views and theories.
And I am really doing him a kindness, for I'm
sure that all the world could not make Alice and
her mother treat him with anything but cold
politeness. It'll be a great mortification to Alice,
but I don't see how else I could have got out of
it.”

He boarded the first car that left the depot,
and soon reached home. The house was lighted
up, and through the lace curtains of the parlor
windows he could see his wife and daughter,
elegantly dressed, waiting to receive their
distinguished visitor. He rang the bell impatiently,
and a servant opened the door.

“The gentleman did n't come?” asked the
maid.

“No,” he said as he hung up his hat. This
brought the ladies to the door.

“He did n't come?” they exclaimed. “What's
the matter?”

“I'll tell you,” he said. “Mary,” this to the
servant, a white girl, who stood in open-eyed
curiosity, “we shan't need you any more
to-night.”

Then he went into the parlor, and, closing
the door, told his story. When he reached the
point where he had discovered the color of the
honorable Mr. Brown, Miss Clayton caught her
breath, and was on the verge of collapse.

“That nigger,” said Mrs. Clayton indignantly,
“can never set foot in this house. But what did
you do with him?”

Mr. Clayton quickly unfolded his plan, and
described the disposition he had made of the
Congressman.

“It 's an awful shame,” said Mrs. Clayton.
“Just think of the trouble and expense we have
gone to! And poor Alice 'll never get over it,
for everybody knows he came to see her and
that he's smitten with her. But you 've done just
right; we never would have been able to hold up
our heads again if we had introduced a black
man, even a Congressman, to the people that are
invited here to-morrow night, as a sweetheart of
Alice. Why, she wouldn't marry him if he was
President of the United States and plated with
gold an inch thick. The very idea!”

“Well,” said Mr. Clayton, “then we've got to
act quick. Alice must wrap up her throat - by
the way, Alice, how is your throat?”

“It 's sore,” sobbed Alice, who had been in
tears almost from her father's return, “and I
don't care if I do have diphtheria and die, no, I
don't!” and she wept on.

“Wrap up your throat and go to bed, and I'll
go over to Doctor Pillsbury's and get a diphtheria
card to nail up on the house. In the morning, first
thing, we 'll have to write notes recalling the
invitations for to-morrow evening, and have them
delivered by messenger boys. We were fools for
not finding out all about this man from some one
who knew, before we invited him here. Sadler
don't know more than half he thinks he does,
anyway. And we'll have to do this thing
thoroughly, or our motives will be misconstrued,
and people will say we are prejudiced and all
that, when it is only a matter of principle with us.”

The programme outlined above was carried
out to the letter. The invitations were recalled, to
the great disappointment of the invited guests.
The family physician called several times during
the day. Alice remained in bed, and the maid left
without notice, in such a hurry that she forgot to
take her best clothes.

Mr. Clayton himself remained at home. He had
a telephone in the house, and was therefore in
easy communication with his office, so that the
business did not suffer materially by reason of his
absence from the store. About ten o'clock in the
morning a note came up from the hotel,
expressing Mr. Brown's regrets and sympathy.
Toward noon Mr. Clayton picked up the morning
paper, which he had not theretofore had time to
read, and was glancing over it casually, when his
eye fell upon a column headed “A Colored
Congressman.” He read the article with
astonishment that rapidly turned to chagrin and
dismay. It was an interview describing the
Congressman as a tall and shapely man, about
thirty-five years old, with an olive complexion not
noticeably darker than many a white man's,
straight hair, and eyes as black as sloes.

“The bearing of this son of South Carolina
reveals the polished manners of the Southern
gentleman, and neither from his appearance nor
his conversation would one suspect that the white
blood which flows in his veins in such
preponderating measure had ever been crossed
by that of a darker race,” wrote the reporter,
who had received instructions at
the office that for urgent business considerations
the lake shipping interest wanted Representative
Brown treated with marked consideration.

There was more of the article, but the
introductory portion left Mr. Clayton in such a
state of bewilderment that the paper fell from his
hand. What was the meaning of it? Had he been
mistaken? Obviously so, or else the reporter
was wrong, which was manifestly improbable.
When he had recovered himself somewhat, he
picked up the newspaper and began reading
where he had left off.

“Representative Brown traveled to Groveland
in company with Bishop Jones of the African
Methodist Jerusalem Church, who is en routeto
attend the general conference of his denomination
at Detroit next week. The bishop, who came in
while the writer was interviewing Mr. Brown, is a
splendid type of the pure negro. He is said to be
a man of great power among his people, which
may easily be believed after one has looked upon
his expressive countenance and heard him
discuss the questions which affect the welfare of
his church and his race.”

Mr. Clayton stared at the paper. “ ‘The
bishop,’ ” he repeated, “ ‘is a splendid type of the
pure negro. I must have mistaken the bishop for
the Congressman! But how in the world did
Jack get the thing balled up? I'll call up the store
and demand an explanation of him.

“Jack,” he asked, “what kind of a looking
man was the fellow you gave the note to at the
depot?”

“He was a very wicked-looking fellow, sir,”
came back the answer. “He had a bad eye,
looked like a gambler, sir. I am not surprised that
you did n't want to entertain him, even if he was a
Congressman.”

“What color was he - that's what I want to
know - and what kind of hair did he have?”

“Why, he was about my complexion, sir, and
had straight black hair.”

The rules of the telephone company did not
permit swearing over the line. Mr. Clayton broke
the rules.

“Was there any one else with him?” he
asked when he had relieved his mind.

“Yes, sir, Bishop Jones of the African
Methodist Jerusalem Church was sitting there
with him; they had traveled from Washington
together. I drove the bishop to his stopping-place
after I had left Mr. Brown at the hotel. I did n't
suppose you'd mind.”

Mr. Clayton fell into a chair, and indulged in
thoughts unutterable.

He folded up the paper and slipped it under
the family Bible, where it was least likely to be
soon discovered.

“I'll hide the paper, anyway,” he groaned. “I'll
never hear the last of this till my dying day, so I
may as well have a few hours' respite. It 's too
late to go back, and we 've got to play the farce
out. Alice is really sick with disappointment, and
to let her know this now would only make her
worse. May be he'll leave town in a day or
two, and then she'll be in condition to stand it.
Such luck is enough to disgust a man with trying
to do right and live up to his principles.”

Time hung a little heavy on Mr. Clayton's
hands during the day. His wife was busy with the
housework. He answered several telephone calls
about Alice's health, and called up the store
occasionally to ask how the business was getting
on. After lunch he lay down on a sofa and took
a nap, from which
he was aroused by the sound of the door-bell.
He went to the door. The evening paper was
lying on the porch, and the newsboy, who had
not observed the diphtheria sign until after he had
rung, was hurrying away as fast as his legs would
carry him.

Mr. Clayton opened the paper and looked it
through to see if there was any reference to the
visiting Congressman. He found what he sought
and more. An article on the local page contained
a résuméof the information given in the morning
paper, with the following additional paragraph: -

“A reporter, who called at the Forest Hill this
morning to interview Representative Brown, was
informed that the Congressman had been invited
to spend the remainder of his time in Groveland
as the guest of Mr. William Watkins, the
proprietor of the popular livery establishment on
Main Street. Mr. Brown will remain in the city
several days, and a reception will be tendered
him at Mr. Watkins's on Wednesday evening.”

But why dwell longer on the sufferings of
Mr. Clayton, or attempt to describe the feelings
or chronicle the remarks of his wife and daughter
when they learned the facts in the case?

As to Representative Brown, he was made
welcome in the hospitable home of Mr. William
Watkins. There was a large and brilliant
assemblage at the party on Wednesday evening,
at which were displayed the costumes prepared
for the Clayton reception. Mr. Brown took a
fancy to Miss Lura Watkins, to whom, before the
week was over, he became engaged to be
married. Meantime poor Alice, the innocent
victim of circumstances and principles, lay sick
abed with a supposititious case of malignant
diphtheria, and a real case of acute
disappointment and chagrin.

“Oh, Jack!” exclaimed Alice, a few weeks
later, on the way home from evening church in
company with the young man, “what a dreadful
thing it all was! And to think of that hateful Lura
Watkins marrying the Congressman!”

The street was shaded by trees at the point
where they were passing, and there was no one
in sight. Jack put his arm around her waist, and,
leaning over, kissed her.

“Never mind, dear,” he said soothingly, “you
still have your ‘last chance’ left, and I 'll prove
myself a better man than the Congressman.”

Occasionally, at social meetings, when the
vexed question of the future of the colored race
comes up, as it often does, for discussion, Mr.
Clayton may still be heard to remark
sententiously: -

“What the white people of the United States
need most, in dealing with this problem, is a
higher conception of the brotherhood of man.
For of one blood God made all the nations of
the earth.”

CICELY'S DREAM
I

THE old woman stood at the back door of the
cabin, shading, her eyes with her hand, and
looking across the vegetable garden that ran up to
the very door. Beyond the garden she saw,
bathed in the sunlight, a field of corn, just in the
ear, stretching for half a mile, its yellow, pollen-laden
tassels over-topping the dark green mass of
broad glistening blades; and in the distance,
through the faint morning haze of evaporating
dew, the line of the woods, of a still darker green,
meeting the clear blue of the summer sky. Old
Dinah saw, going down the path, a tall, brown
girl, in a homespun frock, swinging a slat-bonnet
in one hand and a splint basket in the other.

“Oh, Cicely!” she called.

The girl turned and answered in a resonant
voice, vibrating with youth and life, -

The old woman stood a moment longer and
then turned to go into the house. What she had
not seen was that the girl was not only young, but
lithe and shapely as a sculptor's model; that her
bare feet seemed to spurn the earth as they
struck it; that though brown, she was not so
brown but that her cheek was darkly red with the
blood of another race than that which gave her
her name and station in life; and the old woman
did not see that Cicely's face was as comely as
her figure was superb, and that her eyes were
dreamy with vague yearnings.

Cicely climbed the low fence between the
garden and the cornfield, and started down one
of the long rows leading directly away from the
house. Old Needham was a good ploughman,
and straight as an arrow ran the furrow between
the rows of corn, until it vanished in the distant
perspective. The peas were planted beside
alternate hills of corn, the corn-stalks serving as
supports for the climbing pea-vines. The vines
nearest the house had been picked more or less
clear of the long
green pods, and Cicely walked down the row for
a quarter of a mile, to where the peas were more
plentiful. And as she walked she thought of her
dream of the night before.

She had dreamed a beautiful dream. The fact
that it was a beautiful dream, a delightful dream,
her memory retained very vividly. She was
troubled because she could not remember just
what her dream had been about. Of one other
fact she was certain, that in her dream she had
found something, and that her happiness had been
bound up with the thing she had found. As she
walked down the corn-row she ran over in her
mind the various things with which she had always
associated happiness. Had she found a gold ring?
No, it was not a gold ring - of that she felt sure.
Was it a soft, curly plume for her hat? She had
seen town people with them, and had indulged in
day-dreams on the subject; but it was not a
feather. Was it a brightcolored silk dress? No; as
much as she had always wanted one, it was not a
silk dress. For an instant, in a dream, she had
tasted some great and novel happiness, and when
she awoke it was dashed from her lips, and she
could not even enjoy the memory of it,
except in a vague, indefinite, and tantalizing way.

Cicely was troubled, too, because dreams
were serious things. Dreams had certain
meanings, most of them, and some dreams went
by contraries. If her dream had been a prophecy
of some good thing, she had by forgetting it lost
the pleasure of anticipation. If her dream had
been one of those that go by contraries, the
warning would be in vain, because she would not
know against what evil to provide. So, with a
sigh, Cicely said to herself that it was a troubled
world, more or less; and having come to a
promising point, began to pick the tenderest
pea-pods and throw them into her basket.

By the time she had reached the end of the line
the basket was nearly full. Glancing toward the
pine woods beyond the rail fence, she saw a
brier bush loaded with large, luscious
blackberries. Cicely was fond of blackberries, so
she set her basket down, climbed the fence, and
was soon busily engaged in gathering the fruit,
delicious even in its wild state.

She had soon eaten all she cared for. But the
berries were still numerous, and it occurred
to her that her granddaddy would like a
blackberry pudding for dinner. Catching up her
apron, and using it as a receptacle for the
berries, she had gathered scarcely more than a
handful when she heard a groan.

Cicely was not timid, and her curiosity being
aroused by the sound, she stood erect, and
remained in a listening attitude. In a moment the
sound was repeated, and, gauging the point from
which it came, she plunged resolutely into the
thick underbrush of the forest. She had gone but
a few yards when she stopped short with an
exclamation of surprise and concern.

Upon the ground, under the shadow of the
towering pines, a man lay at full length, - a young
man, several years under thirty, apparently, so far
as his age could be guessed from a face that wore
a short soft beard, and was so begrimed with
dust and incrusted with blood that little could be
seen of the underlying integument. What was
visible showed a skin browned by nature or by
exposure. His hands were of even a darker
brown, almost as dark as Cicely's own. A tangled
mass of very curly black hair, matted with burs,
dank with dew, and clotted with
blood, fell partly over his forehead, on the edge
of which, extending back into the hair, an ugly
scalp wound was gaping, and, though apparently
not just inflicted, was still bleeding slowly, as
though reluctant to stop, in spite of the
coagulation that had almost closed it.

Cicely with a glance took in all this and more.
But, first of all, she saw the man was wounded
and bleeding, and the nurse latent in all
womankind awoke in her to the requirements of
the situation. She knew there was a spring a few
rods away, and ran swiftly to it. There was usually
a gourd at the spring, but now it was gone.
Pouring out the blackberries in a little heap where
they could be found again, she took off her apron,
dipped one end of it into the spring, and ran back
to the wounded man. The apron was clean, and
she squeezed a little stream of water from it into
the man's mouth. He swallowed it with avidity.
Cicely then knelt by his side, and with the wet end
of her apron washed the blood from the wound
lightly, and the dust from the man's face. Then she
looked at her apron a moment, debating whether
she should tear it or not.

“I'm feared granny 'll be mad,” she said to
herself. “I reckon I 'll jes' use de whole apron.”

So she bound the apron around his head as
well as she could, and then sat down a moment
on a fallen tree trunk, to think what she should do
next. The man already seemed more
comfortable; he had ceased moaning, and lay
quiet, though breathing heavily.

“What shall I do with that man?” she
reflected. “I don' know whether he 's a w'ite man
or a black man. Ef he 's a w'ite man, I oughter go
an' tell de w'ite folks up at de big house, an' dey'd
take keer of 'im. If he 's a black man, I oughter
go tell granny. He don' look lack a black man
somehow er nuther, an' yet he don' look lack a
w'ite man; he's too dahk, an' his hair's too curly.
But I mus' do somethin' wid 'im. He can't be lef'
here ter die in de woods all by hisse'f. Reckon I'll
go an' tell granny.”

She scaled the fence, caught up the basket of
peas from where she had left it, and ran, lightly
and swiftly as a deer, toward the house. Her
short skirt did not impede her progress,
and in a few minutes she had
covered the half mile and was at the cabin door,
a slight heaving of her full and yet youthful
breast being the only sign of any unusual exertion.

Her story was told in a moment. The old
woman took down a black bottle from a high
shelf, and set out with Cicely across the
cornfield, toward the wounded man.

As they went through the corn Cicely recalled
part of her dream. She had dreamed that under
some strange circumstances - what they had been
was still obscure - she had met a young man - a
young man whiter than she and yet not all
white - and that he had loved her and courted her
and married her. Her dream had been all the
sweeter because in it she had first tasted the
sweetness of love, and she had not recalled it
before because only in her dream had she known
or thought of love as something supremely
desirable.

With the memory of her dream, however, her
fears revived. Dreams were solemn things. To
Cicely the fabric of a vision was by no means
baseless. Her trouble arose from her not being
able to recall, though she was well versed in
dream-lore, just what event was foreshadowed
by a dream of finding a
wounded man. If the wounded man were of her
own race, her dream would thus far have been
realized, and having met the young man, the other
joys might be expected to follow. If he should
turn out to be a white man, then her dream was
clearly one of the kind that go by contraries, and
she could expect only sorrow and trouble and
pain as the proper sequences of this fateful
discovery.

II

The two women reached the fence that
separated the cornfield from the pine woods.

“How is I gwine ter git ovuh dat fence, chile?”
asked the old woman.

“Wait a minute, granny,” said Cicely; “I'll take
it down.”

It was only an eight-rail fence, and it was a
matter of but a few minutes for the girl to lift
down and lay to either side the ends of the rails
that formed one of the angles. This done, the old
woman easily stepped across the remaining two
or three rails. It was only a moment before they
stood by the wounded man. He was lying still,
breathing regularly, and seemingly asleep.

Old Dinah pushed back the matted hair from
the wounded man's brow, and looked at the skin
beneath. It was fairer there, but yet of a decided
brown. She raised his hand pushed back the
tattered sleeve from his wrist and then she laid
his hand down gently.

“Mos' lackly he 's a mulatter man f'om up de
country somewhar. He don' look lack dese yer
niggers roun' yere, ner yet lack a w'ite man. But
de po' boy 's in a bad fix, w'ateber he is, an' I
'spec's we bettah do w'at we kin fer 'im, an' w'en
he comes to he 'll tell us w'at he is - er w'at he
calls hisse'f. Hol' 'is head up, chile, an' I 'll po' a
drop er dis yer liquor down his th'oat; dat 'll bring
'im to quicker 'n anything e'se I knows.”

Cicely lifted the sick man's head, and Dinah
poured a few drops of the whiskey between his
teeth. He swallowed it readily enough. In a few
minutes he opened his eyes and stared blankly at
the two women. Cicely saw that his eyes were
large and black, and glistening with fever.

“How you feelin', suh?” asked the old
woman.

There was no answer.

“Is you feelin' bettah now?”

The wounded man kept on staring blankly.
Suddenly he essayed to put his hand to his head,
gave a deep groan, and fell back again
unconscious.

“He 's gone ag'in,” said Dinah. “I reckon we'll
hefter tote 'im up ter de house and take keer
er 'im dere. W'ite folks would n't want ter fool
wid a nigger man, an' we doan know who his
folks is. He 's outer his head an' will be fer some
time yet, an' we can't tell nuthin' 'bout 'im tel he
comes ter his senses.”

Cicely lifted the wounded man by the arms and
shoulders. She was strong, with the strength of
youth and a sturdy race. The man was pitifully
emaciated; how much, the two women had not
suspected until they raised him. They had no
difficulty whatever, except for the awkwardness
of such a burden, in lifting him over the fence and
carrying him through the cornfield to the cabin.

They laid him on Cicely's bed in the little
lean-to shed that formed a room separate from the
main apartment of the cabin. The old woman sent
Cicely to cook the dinner, while
she gave her own attention exclusively to the still
unconscious man. She brought water and washed
him as though he were a child.

She made a bowl of gruel, and fed it, drop by
drop, to the sick man. This roused him somewhat
from his stupor, but when Dinah thought he had
enough of the gruel, and stopped feeding him, he
closed his eyes again and relapsed into a heavy
sleep that was so
closely akin to unconsciousness as to be scarcely
distinguishable from it.

When old Needham came home at noon, his
wife, who had been anxiously awaiting his return,
told him in a few words the story of Cicely's
discovery and of the subsequent events.

Needham inspected the stranger with a
professional eye. He had been something of a
plantation doctor in his day, and was known far
and wide for his knowledge of simple remedies.
The negroes all around, as well as many of the
poorer white people, came to him for the
treatment of common ailments.

Needham's prophecy proved true. In less than
a week the Confederate garrison evacuated the
arsenal in the neighboring town of Patesville,
blew up the buildings, destroyed
the ordnance and stores, and retreated across
the Cape Fear River, burning the river bridge
behind them, - two acts of war afterwards
unjustly attributed to General Sherman's army,
which followed close upon the heels of the
retreating Confederates.

When there was no longer any fear for the
stranger's safety, no more pains were taken to
conceal him. His wound had healed rapidly, and
in a week he had been able with some help to
climb up the ladder into the loft. In all this time,
however, though apparently conscious, he had
said no word to any one, nor had he seemed to
comprehend a word that was spoken to him.

Cicely had been his constant attendant. After
the first day, during which her granny had nursed
him, she had sat by his bedside, had fanned his
fevered brow, had held food and water and
medicine to his lips. When it was safe for him to
come down from the loft and sit in a chair under
a spreading oak, Cicely supported him until he
was strong enough to walk about the yard. When
his strength had increased sufficiently to permit of
greater exertion, she accompanied him on long
rambles in the fields and woods.

In spite of his gain in physical strength, the
newcomer changed very little in other respects.
For a long time he neither spoke nor smiled. To
questions put to him he simply gave no reply, but
looked at his questioner with the blank
unconsciousness of an infant. By and by he began
to recognize Cicely, and to smile at her approach.
The next step in returning consciousness was but
another manifestation of the same sentiment.
When Cicely would leave him he would look his
regret, and be restless and uneasy until she
returned.

The family were at a loss what to call him. To
any inquiry as to his name he answered no more
than to other questions.

“He come jes' befo' Sherman,” said
Needham, after a few weeks, “lack John de
Baptis' befo' de Lawd. I reckon we bettah call
'im John.”

So they called him John. He soon learned the
name. As time went on Cicely found that he was
quick at learning things. She taught him to speak
her own negro English, which he pronounced with
absolute fidelity to her intonations; so that barring
the quality of his voice, his speech was an echo
of Cicely's own.

The summer wore away and the autumn
came. John and Cicely wandered in the woods
together and gathered walnuts, and chinquapins
and wild grapes. When harvest time came, they
worked in the fields side by side, - plucked the
corn, pulled the fodder, and gathered the dried
peas from the yellow pea-vines. Cicely was a
phenomenal cotton-picker, and John
accompanied her to the fields and stayed by her
hours at a time, though occasionally he would
complain of his head, and sit under a tree and
rest part of the day while Cicely worked, the two
keeping one another always in sight.

They did not have a great deal of intercourse
with other people. Young men came to the cabin
sometimes to see Cicely, but when they found her
entirely absorbed in the stranger they ceased their
visits. For a time Cicely kept him away, as much
as possible, from others, because she did not
wish them to see that there was anything wrong
about him. This was her motive at first, but after a
while she kept him to herself simply because she
was happier so. He was hers - hers alone. She
had found him, as Pharaoh's daughter had found
Moses in the bulrushes; she had
taught him to speak, to think, to love. She had
not taught him to remember; she would not have
wished him to; she would have been jealous of
any past to which he might have proved bound
by other ties. Her dream so far had come true.
She had found him, he loved her. The rest of it
would as surely follow, and that before long. For
dreams were serious things, and time had proved
hers to have been not a presage of misfortune,
but one of the beneficent visions that are sent, that
we may enjoy by anticipation the good things
that are in store for us.

III

But a short interval of time elapsed after the
passage of the warlike host that swept through
North Carolina, until there appeared upon the
scene the vanguard of a second army, which
came to bring light and the fruits of liberty to a
land which slavery and the havoc of war had
brought to ruin. It is fashionable to assume that
those who undertook the political rehabilitation of
the Southern States merely rounded out the ruin
that the war had wrought - merely ploughed up
the desolate land and sowed it with salt. Perhaps
the gentler judgments of the future may recognize
that their task was a difficult one, and that wiser
and honester men might have failed as
egregiously. It may even, in time, be conceded
that some good came out of the carpet-bag
governments, as, for instance, the establishment
of a system of popular education in the former
slave States. Where it had been a crime to teach
people to read or write, a schoolhouse dotted
every hillside, and the State provided education
for rich and poor, for white and black alike. Let
us lay at least this token upon the grave of the
carpet-baggers. The evil they did lives after them,
and the statute of limitations does not seem to run
against it. It is but just that we should not forget
the good.

Long, however, before the work of political
reconstruction had begun, a brigade of Yankee
schoolmasters and schoolma'ams had invaded
Dixie, and one of the latter had opened a
Freedman's Bureau School in the town of
Patesville, about four miles from Needham
Green's cabin on the neighboring sandhills.

It had been quite a surprise to Miss Chandler's
Boston friends when she had announced
her intention of going South to teach the
freedmen. Rich, accomplished, beautiful, and a
social favorite, she was giving up the comforts
and luxuries of Northern life to go among hostile
strangers, where her associates would be mostly
ignorant negroes. Perhaps she might meet
occasionally an officer of some Federal garrison,
or a traveler from the North; but to all intents and
purposes her friends considered her as going into
voluntary exile. But heroism was not rare in those
days, and Martha Chandler was only one of the
great multitude whose hearts went out toward an
oppressed race, and who freely poured out their
talents, their money, their lives, - whatever God
had given them, - in the sublime and not unfruitful
effort to transform three millions of slaves into
intelligent freemen. Miss Chandler's friends knew,
too, that she had met a great sorrow, and more
than suspected that out of it had grown her
determination to go South.

When Cicely Green heard that a school for
colored people had been opened at Patesville
she combed her hair, put on her Sunday frock
and such bits of finery as she possessed, and set
out for town early the next Monday morning.

There were many who came to learn the new
gospel of education, which was to be the cure for
all the freedmen's ills. The old and gray-haired,
the full-grown man and woman, the toddling
infant, - they came to acquire the new and
wonderful learning that was to make them the
equals of the white people. It was the teacher's
task, by no means an easy one, to select from this
incongruous mass the most promising material,
and to distribute among them the second-hand
books and clothing that were sent, largely by her
Boston friends, to aid her in her work; to find out
what they knew, to classify them by their
intelligence rather than by their knowledge, for
they were all lamentably ignorant. Some among
them were the children of parents who had been
free before the war, and of these some few could
read and one or two could write. One paragon,
who could repeat the multiplication table, was
immediately promoted to the position of pupil
teacher.

Miss Chandler took a liking to the tall girl who
had come so far to sit under her instruction.
There was a fine, free air in her bearing, a
lightness in her step, a sparkle in her eye, that
spoke of good blood, - whether
fused by nature in its own alembic, out of material
despised and spurned of men, or whether some
obscure ancestral strain, the teacher could not tell.
The girl proved intelligent and learned rapidly,
indeed seemed almost feverishly anxious to learn.
She was quiet, and was, though utterly untrained,
instinctively polite, and profited from the first day
by the example of her teacher's quiet elegance.
The teacher dressed in simple black. When
Cicely came back to school the second day, she
had left off her glass beads and her red ribbon,
and had arranged her hair as nearly like the
teacher's as her skill and its quality would permit.

The teacher was touched by these efforts at
imitation, and by the intense devotion Cicely soon
manifested toward her. It was not a sycophantic,
troublesome devotion, that made itself a burden
to its object. It found expression in little things
done rather than in any words the girl said. To the
degree that the attraction was mutual, Martha
recognized in it a sort of freemasonry of
temperament that drew them together in spite of
the differences between them. Martha felt
sometimes, in the vague way that one
speculates about the impossible, that if she were
brown, and had been brought up in North
Carolina, she would be like Cicely; and that if
Cicely's ancestors had come over in the
Mayflower, and Cicely had been reared on
Beacon Street, in the shadow of the State House
dome, Cicely would have been very much like
herself.

Miss Chandler was lonely sometimes. Her
duties kept her occupied all day. On Sundays she
taught a Bible class in the school-room.
Correspondence with bureau officials and friends
at home furnished her with additional occupation.
At times, nevertheless, she felt a longing for the
company of women of her own race; but the
white ladies of the town did not call, even in the
most formal way, upon the Yankee school-teacher.
Miss Chandler was therefore fain to do
the best she could with such companionship as
was available. She took Cicely to her home
occasionally, and asked her once to stay all night.
Thinking, however, that she detected a reluctance
on the girl's part to remain away from home, she
did not repeat her invitation.

Cicely, indeed, was filling a double rôle.
The learning acquired from Miss Chandler she
imparted to John at home. Every evening, by the
light of the pine-knots blazing on Needham's
ample hearth, she taught John to read the simple
words she had learned during the day. Why she
did not take him to school she had never asked
herself; there were several other pupils as old as
he seemed to be. Perhaps she still thought it
necessary to protect him from curious remark. He
worked with Needham by day, and she could see
him at night, and all of Saturdays and Sundays.
Perhaps it was the jealous selfishness of love. She
had found him; he was hers. In the spring, when
school was over, her granny had said that she
might marry him. Till then her dream would not yet
have come true, and she must keep him to herself.
And yet she did not wish him to lose this golden
key to the avenues of opportunity. She would not
take him to school, but she would teach him each
day all that she herself had learned. He was not
difficult to teach, but learned, indeed, with what
seemed to Cicely marvelous ease, - always,
however, by her lead, and never of his own
initiative. For while he could do a man's work, he
was in most things but a child,
without a child's curiosity. His love for Cicely
appeared the only thing for which he needed no
suggestion; and even that possessed an element
of childish dependence that would have seemed,
to minds trained to thoughtful observation,
infinitely pathetic.

The spring came and cotton-planting time. The
children began to drop out of Miss Chandler's
school one by one, as their services were
required at home. Cicely was among those who
intended to remain in school until the term closed
with the “exhibition,” in which she was assigned a
leading part. She had selected her recitation, or
“speech,” from among half a dozen poems that her
teacher had suggested, and to memorizing it she
devoted considerable time and study. The
exhibition, as the first of its kind, was sure to be a
notable event. The parents and friends of the
children were invited to attend, and a colored
church, recently erected, - the largest available
building, - was secured as the place where the
exercises should take place.

On the morning of the eventful day, uncle
Needham, assisted by John, harnessed the mule
to the two-wheeled cart, on which a
couple of splint-bottomed chairs were fastened to
accommodate Dinah and Cicely. John put on his
best clothes, - an ill-fitting suit of blue jeans, - a
round wool hat, a pair of coarse brogans, a
homespun shirt, and a bright blue necktie. Cicely
wore her best frock, a red ribbon at her throat,
another in her hair, and carried a bunch of
flowers in her hand. Uncle Needham and aunt
Dinah were also in holiday array. Needham and
John took their seats on opposite sides of the
cart-frame, with their feet dangling down, and thus
the equipage set out leisurely for the town.

Cicely had long looked forward impatiently to
this day. She was going to marry John the next
week, and then her dream would have come
entirely true. But even this anticipated happiness
did not overshadow the importance of the
present occasion, which would be an epoch in
her life, a day of joy and triumph. She knew her
speech perfectly, and timidity was not one of her
weaknesses. She knew that the red ribbons set
off her dark beauty effectively, and that her dress
fitted neatly the curves of her shapely figure. She
confidently expected to win the
first prize, a large morocco-covered Bible,
offered by Miss Chandler for the best exercise.

Cicely and her companions soon arrived at
Patesville. Their entrance into the church made
quite a sensation, for Cicely was not only an
acknowledged belle, but a general favorite, and to
John there attached a tinge of mystery which
inspired a respect not bestowed upon those who
had grown up in the neighborhood. Cicely
secured a seat in the front part of the church, next
to the aisle, in the place reserved for the pupils.
As the house was already partly filled by
townspeople when the party from the country
arrived, Needham and his wife and John were
forced to content themselves with places
somewhat in the rear of the room, from which
they could see and hear what took place on the
platform, but where they were not at all conspicuously
visible to those at the front of the church.

The schoolmistress had not yet arrived, and
order was preserved in the audience by two of
the elder pupils, adorned with large rosettes of
red, white, and blue, who ushered the most
important visitors to the seats
reserved for them. A national flag was gracefully
draped over the platform, and under it hung a
lithograph of the Great Emancipator, for it was
thus these people thought of him. He had saved
the Union, but the Union had never meant
anything good to them. He had proclaimed liberty
to the captive, which meant all to them; and to
them he was and would ever be the Great
Emancipator.

The schoolmistress came in at a rear door and
took her seat upon the platform. Martha was
dressed in white; for once she had laid aside the
sombre garb in which alone she had been seen
since her arrival at Patesville. She wore a yellow
rose at her throat, a bunch of jasmine in her belt.
A sense of responsibility for the success of the
exhibition had deepened the habitual seriousness
of her face, yet she greeted the audience with a
smile.

“Don' Miss Chan'ler look sweet,” whispered
the little girls to one another, devouring her
beauty with sparkling eyes, their lips parted over
a wealth of ivory.

“De Lawd will bress dat chile,” said one old
woman, in soliloquy. “I t'ank de good Marster I's
libbed ter see dis day.”

Even envy could not hide its noisome head:
a pretty quadroon whispered to her neighbor: -

“By Jove, Maxwell!” exclaimed a young
officer, who belonged to the Federal garrison
stationed in the town, “but that girl is a beauty.”
The speaker and a companion were in fatigue
uniform, and had merely dropped in for an hour
between garrison duty. The ushers had wished to
give them seats on the platform, but they had
declined, thinking that perhaps their presence
there might embarrass the teacher. They sought
rather to avoid observation by sitting behind a
pillar in the rear of the room, around which they
could see without attracting undue attention.

“To think,” the lieutenant went on, “of
that Junonian figure, those lustrous orbs, that
golden coronal, that flower of Northern
civilization, being wasted on these barbarians!”
The speaker uttered an exaggerated but
suppressed groan.

His companion, a young man of clean-shaven
face and serious aspect, nodded assent, but
whispered reprovingly, -

“ 'Sh! some one will hear you. The exercises
are going to begin.”

When Miss Chandler stepped forward to
announce the hymn to be sung by the school as
the first exercise, every eye in the room was fixed
upon her, except John's, which saw only Cicely.
When the teacher had uttered a few words, he
looked up to her, and from that moment did not
take his eyes off Martha's face.

After the singing, a little girl, dressed in white,
crossed by ribbons of red and blue, recited with
much spirit a patriotic poem.

When Martha announced the third exercise,
John's face took on a more than usually animated
expression, and there was a perceptible
deepening of the troubled look in his eyes, never
entirely absent since Cicely had found him in the
woods.

A little yellow boy, with long curls, and a
frightened air, next ascended the platform.

“Now, Jimmie, be a man, and speak right
out,” whispered his teacher, tapping his arm
reassuringly with her fan as he passed her.

Jimmie essayed to recite the lines so familiar to
a past generation of schoolchildren: -

“I knew a widow very poor,Who four small children had;The eldest was but six years old,A gentle, modest lad.”

He ducked his head hurriedly in a futile
attempt at a bow; then, following instructions
previously given him, fixed his eyes upon a large
cardboard motto hanging on the rear wall of the
room, which admonished him in bright red letters
to

“ALWAYS SPEAK THE TRUTH,”

and started off with assumed confidence -

“I knew a widow very poor,Who” -

At this point, drawn by an irresistible impulse, his
eyes sought the level of the audience. Ah, fatal
blunder! He stammered, but with an effort raised
his eyes and began again:

“I knew a widow very poor,Who four” -

Again his treacherous eyes fell, and his little
remaining self-possession utterly forsook him. He
made one more despairing effort: -

“I knew a widow very poor,Who four small” -

and then, bursting into tears, turned and fled
amid a murmur of sympathy.

Jimmie's inglorious retreat was covered by the
singing in chorus of “The Star-spangled Banner,”
after which Cicely Green came forward to recite
her poem.

“By Jove, Maxwell!” whispered the young
officer, who was evidently a connoisseur of
female beauty, “that is n't bad for a bronze
Venus. I 'll tell you” -

“ 'Sh!” said the other. “Keep still.”

When Cicely finished her recitation, the young
officers began to applaud, but stopped suddenly
in some confusion as they realized that they were
the only ones in the audience so engaged. The
colored people had either not learned how to
express their approval in orthodox fashion, or
else their respect for the sacred character of the
edifice forbade any such demonstration. Their
enthusiasm found
vent, however, in a subdued murmur,
emphasized by numerous nods and winks and
suppressed exclamations. During the singing that
followed Cicely's recitation the two officers
quietly withdrew, their duties calling them away
at this hour.

At the close of the exercises, a committee on
prizes met in the vestibule, and unanimously
decided that Cicely Green was entitled to the first
prize. Proudly erect, with sparkling eyes and
cheeks flushed with victory, Cicely advanced to
the platform to receive the coveted reward. As
she turned away, her eyes, shining with gratified
vanity, sought those of her lover.

John sat bent slightly forward in an attitude of
strained attention; and Cicely's triumph lost half its
value when she saw that it was not at her, but at
Miss Chandler, that his look was directed.
Though she watched him thenceforward, not one
glance did he vouchsafe to his jealous sweetheart,
and never for an instant withdrew his eyes from
Martha, or relaxed the unnatural intentness of his
gaze. The imprisoned mind, stirred to unwonted
effort, was struggling for liberty; and from Martha
had come the first ray of outer light that had
penetrated its dungeon.

Before the audience was dismissed, the
teacher rose to bid her school farewell. Her
intention was to take a vacation of three months;
but what might happen in that time she did not
know, and there were duties at home of such
apparent urgency as to render her return to North
Carolina at least doubtful; so that in her own
heart her au revoir sounded very much like a
farewell.

She spoke to them of the hopeful progress
they had made, and praised them for their eager
desire to learn. She told them of the serious
duties of life, and of the use they should make of
their acquirements. With prophetic finger she
pointed them to the upward way which they must
climb with patient feet to raise themselves out of
the depths.

Then, an unusual thing with her, she spoke of
herself. Her heart was full; it was with difficulty
that she maintained her composure; for the faces
that confronted her were kindly faces, and not
critical, and some of them she had learned to
love right well.

“I am going away from you, my children,” she
said; “but before I go I want to tell you how I
came to be in North Carolina; so that if I have
been able to do anything here among
you for which you might feel inclined, in your
good nature, to thank me, you may thank not me
alone, but another who came before me, and
whose work I have but taken up where he laid it
down. I had a friend, - a dear friend, - why
should I be ashamed to say it? - a lover, to whom
I was to be married, - as I hope all you girls may
some day be happily married. His country needed
him, and I gave him up. He came to fight for the
Union and for Freedom, for he believed that all
men are brothers. He did not come back again
- he gave up his life for you. Could I do less than
he? I came to the land that he sanctified by his
death, and I have tried in my weak way to tend
the plant he watered with his blood, and which, in
the fullness of time, will blossom forth into the
perfect flower of liberty.”

She could say no more, and as the whole
audience thrilled in sympathy with her emotion,
there was a hoarse cry from the men's side of the
room, and John forced his way to the aisle and
rushed forward to the platform.

“Martha! Martha!”

“Arthur! O Arthur!”

Pent-up love burst the flood-gates of despair
and oblivion, and caught these two young
hearts in its torrent. Captain Arthur Carey, of the
1st Massachusetts, long since reported missing,
and mourned as dead, was restored to reason
and to his world.

It seemed to him but yesterday that he had
escaped from the Confederate prison at
Salisbury; that in an encounter with a guard he
had received a wound in the head; that he had
wandered on in the woods, keeping himself alive
by means of wild berries, with now and then a
piece of bread or a potato from a friendly negro.
It seemed but the night before that he had laid
himself down, tortured with fever, weak from loss
of blood, and with no hope that he would ever
rise again. From that moment his memory of the
past was a blank until he recognized Martha on
the platform and took up again the thread of his
former existence where it had been broken off.

And Cicely? Well, there is often another
woman, and Cicely, all unwittingly to Carey or to
Martha, had been the other woman. For, after
all, her beautiful dream had been one of the kind
that go by contraries.

THE PASSING OF GRANDISON
I

WHEN it is said that it was done to please a
woman, there ought perhaps to be enough said
to explain anything; for what a man will not do to
please a woman is yet to be discovered.
Nevertheless, it might be well to state a few
preliminary facts to make it clear why young
Dick Owens tried to run one of his father's negro
men off to Canada.

In the early fifties, when the growth of anti-slavery
sentiment and the constant drain of fugitive slaves
into the North had so alarmed the slaveholders of the
border States as to lead to the passage of the
Fugitive Slave Law, a young white man from Ohio,
moved by compassion for the sufferings of a
certain bondman who happened to have a “hard master,”
essayed to help the slave to freedom. The attempt
was discovered and frustrated; the abductor was
tried and convicted for slave-stealing, and sentenced
to a term of imprisonment
in the penitentiary. His death, after the
expiration of only a small part of the sentence,
from cholera contracted while nursing stricken
fellow prisoners, lent to the case a melancholy
interest that made it famous in anti-slavery
annals.

Dick Owens had attended the trial. He was a
youth of about twenty-two, intelligent, handsome,
and amiable, but extremely indolent, in a graceful
and gentlemanly way; or, as old Judge Fenderson
put it more than once, he was lazy as the
Devil, - a mere figure of speech, of course, and
not one that did justice to the Enemy of Mankind.
When asked why he never did anything serious,
Dick would good-naturedly reply, with a
well-modulated drawl, that he did n't have to. His
father was rich; there was but one other child, an
unmarried daughter, who because of poor health
would probably never marry, and Dick was
therefore heir presumptive to a large estate.
Wealth or social position he did not need to seek,
for he was born to both. Charity Lomax had
shamed him into studying law, but
notwithstanding an hour or so a day spent at old
Judge Fenderson's office, he did not make
remarkable headway in his legal studies.

“What Dick needs,” said the judge, who was
fond of tropes, as became a scholar, and of
horses, as was befitting a Kentuckian, “is the
whip of necessity, or the spur of ambition. If he
had either, he would soon need the snaffle to
hold him back.”

But all Dick required, in fact, to prompt him to
the most remarkable thing he accomplished
before he was twenty-five, was a mere
suggestion from Charity Lomax. The story was
never really known to but two persons until after
the war, when it came out because it was a good
story and there was no particular reason for its
concealment.

Young Owens had attended the trial of this
slave-stealer, or martyr, - either or both, - and,
when it was over, had gone to call on Charity
Lomax, and, while they sat on the veranda after
sundown, had told her all about the trial. He was
a good talker, as his career in later years
disclosed, and described the proceedings very
graphically.

“I confess,” he admitted, “that while my
principles were against the prisoner, my
sympathies were on his side. It appeared that he
was of good family, and that he had an old father
and mother, respectable people, dependent
upon him for support and comfort in their
declining years. He had been led into the matter
by pity for a negro whose master ought to have
been run out of the county long ago for abusing
his slaves. If it had been merely a question of old
Sam Briggs's negro, nobody would have cared
anything about it. But father and the rest of them
stood on the principle of the thing, and told the
judge so, and the fellow was sentenced to three
years in the penitentiary.”

Miss Lomax had listened with lively interest.

“I 've always hated old Sam Briggs,” she said
emphatically, “ever since the time he broke a
negro's leg with a piece of cordwood. When I
hear of a cruel deed it makes the Quaker blood
that came from my grandmother assert itself.
Personally I wish that all Sam Briggs's negroes
would run away. As for the young man, I regard
him as a hero. He dared something for humanity.
I could love a man who would take such chances
for the sake of others.”

“Could you love me, Charity, if I did
something heroic?”

“You never will, Dick. You're too lazy
for any use. You'll never do anything harder than
playing cards or fox-hunting.”

“Oh, come now, sweetheart! I've been
courting you for a year, and it's the hardest work
imaginable. Are you never going to love me?”
he pleaded.

His hand sought hers, but she drew it back
beyond his reach.

“I'll never love you, Dick Owens, until you
have done something. When that time comes, I'll
think about it.”

“But it takes so long to do anything worth
mentioning, and I don't want to wait. One must
read two years to become a lawyer, and work
five more to make a reputation. We shall both be
gray by then.”

“Oh, I don't know,” she rejoined. “It does n't
require a lifetime for a man to prove that he is a
man. This one did something, or at least tried to.”

“Well, I'm willing to attempt as much as any
other man. What do you want me to do,
sweetheart? Give me a test.”

“Oh, dear me!” said Charity, “I don't care
what you do, so you do something. Really,
come to think of it, why should I care whether
you do anything or not?”

“I'm sure I don't know why you should,
Charity,” rejoined Dick humbly, “for I 'm aware
that I 'm not worthy of it.”

“Except that I do hate,” she added, relenting
slightly, “to see a really clever man so utterly lazy
and good for nothing.”

“Thank you, my dear; a word of praise from
you has sharpened my wits already. I have an
idea! Will you love me if I run a negro off to
Canada?”

“What nonsense!” said Charity scornfully.
“You must be losing your wits. Steal another
man's slave, indeed, while your father owns a
hundred!”

“Oh, there'll be no trouble about that,”
responded Dick lightly; “I'll run off one of the
old man's; we 've got too many anyway. It may
not be quite as difficult as the other man found it,
but it will be just as unlawful, and will
demonstrate what I am capable of.”

“Seeing 's believing,” replied Charity. “Of
course, what you are talking about now is merely
absurd. I'm going away for three weeks, to visit
my aunt in Tennessee. If you're able to tell me,
when I return, that you 've done something to
prove your quality, I'll - well, you may come and
tell me about it.”

II

Young Owens got up about nine o'clock next
morning, and while making his toilet put some
questions to his personal attendant, a rather
bright looking young mulatto of about his own
age.

“Tom,” said Dick.

“Yas, Mars Dick,” responded the servant.

“I 'm going on a trip North. Would you like to
go with me?”

Now, if there was anything that Tom would
have liked to make, it was a trip North. It was
something he had long contemplated in the
abstract, but had never been able to muster up
sufficient courage to attempt in the concrete. He
was prudent enough, however, to dissemble his
feelings.

Tom's eyes belied his words, however, and his
young master felt well assured that Tom needed
only a good opportunity to make him run away.
Having a comfortable home, and a dismal
prospect in case of failure, Tom was not likely to
take any desperate chances; but
young Owens was satisfied that in a free State
but little persuasion would be required to lead
Tom astray. With a very logical and characteristic
desire to gain his end with the least necessary
expenditure of effort, he decided to take Tom
with him, if his father did not object.

Colonel Owens had left the house when Dick
went to breakfast, so Dick did not see his father
till luncheon.

“Father,” he remarked casually to the colonel,
over the fried chicken, “I'm feeling a trifle run
down. I imagine my health would be improved
somewhat by a little travel and change of scene.”

“Why don't you take a trip North?”
suggested his father. The colonel added to
paternal affection a considerable respect for his
son as the heir of a large estate. He himself had
been “raised” in comparative poverty, and had
laid the foundations of his fortune by hard work;
and while he despised the ladder by which he
had climbed, he could not entirely forget it, and
unconsciously manifested, in his intercourse with
his son, some of the poor man's deference
toward the wealthy and well-born.

“I think I'll adopt your suggestion, sir,” replied
the son, “and run up to New York; and after
I've been there awhile I may go on to Boston for
a week or so. I've never been there, you know.”

“There are some matters you can talk over with
my factor in New York,” rejoined the colonel,
“and while you are up there among the Yankees, I
hope you'll keep your eyes and ears open to find
out what the rascally abolitionists are saying and
doing. They're becoming altogether too active for
our comfort, and entirely too many ungrateful
niggers are running away. I hope the conviction of
that fellow yesterday may discourage the rest of
the breed. I'd just like to catch any one trying to
run off one of my darkeys. He 'd get short shrift; I
don't think any Court would have a chance to try
him.”

“They are a pestiferous lot,” assented Dick,
“and dangerous to our institutions. But say, father,
if I go North I shall want to take Tom with me.”

Now, the colonel, while a very indulgent
father, had pronounced views on the subject of
negroes, having studied them, as he often said,
for a great many years, and, as he
asserted oftener still, understanding them
perfectly. It is scarcely worth while to say,
either, that he valued more highly than if he had
inherited them the slaves he had toiled and
schemed for.

“I don't think it safe to take Tom up North,”
he declared, with promptness and decision.
“He's a good enough boy, but too smart to trust
among those low-down abolitionists. I strongly
suspect him of having learned to read, though I
can't imagine how. I saw him with a newspaper
the other day, and while he pretended to be
looking at a woodcut, I'm almost sure he was
reading the paper. I think it by no means safe to
take him.”

Dick did not insist, because he knew it was
useless. The colonel would have obliged his son
in any other matter, but his negroes were the
outward and visible sign of his wealth and
station, and therefore sacred to him.

“Whom do you think it safe to take?” asked
Dick. “I suppose I'll have to have a
body-servant.”

“What's the matter with Grandison?”
suggested the colonel. “He 's handy enough, and
I reckon we can trust him. He's too fond of good
eating, to risk losing his regular
meals; besides, he's sweet on your mother's
maid, Betty, and I 've promised to let 'em get
married before long. I'll have Grandison up,
and we'll talk to him. Here, you boy Jack,” called
the colonel to a yellow youth in the next room
who was catching flies and pulling their wings off
to pass the time, “go down to the barn and tell
Grandison to come here.”

“Grandison,” said the colonel, when the negro
stood before him, hat in hand.

“Yas, marster.”

“Have n't I always treated you right?”

“Yas, marster.”

“Haven't you always got all you wanted to
eat?”

“Yas, marster.”

“And as much whiskey and tobacco as was
good for you, Grandison?”

“Y-a-s, marster.”

“I should just like to know, Grandison,
whether you don't think yourself a great deal
better off than those poor free negroes down by
the plank road, with no kind master to look after
them and no mistress to give them medicine
when they're sick and - and” -

The colonel was beaming. This was true
gratitude, and his feudal heart thrilled at such
appreciative homage. What cold-blooded,
heartless monsters they were who would break
up this blissful relationship of kindly protection on
the one hand, of wise subordination and loyal
dependence on the other! The colonel always
became indignant at the mere thought of such
wickedness.

“Grandison,” the colonel continued, “your
young master Dick is going North for a few
weeks, and I am thinking of letting him take you
along. I shall send you on this trip, Grandison, in
order that you may take care of your young
master. He will need some one to wait on him,
and no one can ever do it so well as one of the
boys brought up with him on the old plantation. I
am going to trust him in your hands, and I'm sure
you'll do your duty faithfully, and bring him back
home safe and sound - to old Kentucky.”

“I want to warn you, though, Grandison,”
continued the colonel impressively, “against these
cussed abolitionists, who try to entice servants
from their comfortable homes and their indulgent
masters, from the blue skies, the green fields, and
the warm sunlight of their southern home, and
send them away off yonder to Canada, a dreary
country, where the woods are full of wildcats and
wolves and bears, where the snow lies up to the
eaves of the houses for six months of the year,
and the cold is so severe that it freezes your
breath and curdles your blood; and where, when
runaway niggers get sick and can't work, they are
turned out to starve and die, unloved and
uncared for. I reckon, Grandison, that you have
too much sense to permit yourself to be led
astray by any such foolish and wicked people.”

“I don't know, Grandison,” replied the
colonel, lighting a fresh cigar. “They're a
desperate set of lunatics, and there 's no telling
what they may resort to. But if you stick close to
your young master, and remember always that he
is your best friend, and understands your real
needs, and has your true interests at heart, and if
you will be careful to avoid strangers who try to
talk to you, you 'll stand a fair chance of getting
back to your home and your friends. And if you
please your master Dick, he 'll buy you a present,
and a string of beads for Betty to wear when you
and she get married in the fall.”

“Thanky, marster, thanky, suh,” replied
Grandison, oozing gratitude at every pore; “you
is a good marster, to be sho', suh; yas, 'deed
you is. You kin jes' bet me and Mars Dick gwine
git 'long jes' lack I wuz own boy ter Mars Dick.
En it won't be my fault ef he don' want me fer his
boy all de time, w'en we come back home ag'in.”

“All right, Grandison, you may go now. You
need n't work any more to-day, and here's a
piece of tobacco for you off my own plug.”

“Thanky, marster, thanky, marster! You is de
bes' marster any nigger ever had in dis worl'.”
And Grandison bowed and scraped and
disappeared round the corner, his jaws closing
around a large section of the colonel's best
tobacco.

“You may take Grandison,” said the colonel to
his son. “I allow he's abolitionist-proof.”

III

Richard Owens, Esq., and servant, from
Kentucky, registered at the fashionable New
York hostelry for Southerners in those days, a
hotel where an atmosphere congenial to
Southern institutions was sedulously maintained.
But there were negro waiters in the dining-room,
and mulatto bell-boys, and Dick had no doubt
that Grandison, with the native gregariousness
and garrulousness of his race, would foregather
and palaver with them sooner or later, and Dick
hoped that they would speedily inoculate him with
the virus of freedom. For it was not Dick's
intention to say anything to his servant about his
plan to free him, for obvious reasons. To mention
one of them, if Grandison should go away, and by
legal process be recaptured, his young master's
part in the matter would doubtless become
known, which would be embarrassing to Dick, to
say the least. If, on the other hand, he should
merely give Grandison sufficient latitude, he had
no doubt he would eventually lose him. For while
not exactly skeptical about Grandison's perfervid
loyalty, Dick had been a somewhat keen
observer of human nature, in his own indolent
way, and based his expectations upon the force
of the example and argument that his servant
could scarcely fail to encounter. Grandison should
have a fair chance to become free by his own
initiative; if it should become necessary to
adopt other measures to get rid of him, it would
be time enough to act when the necessity arose;
and Dick Owens was not the youth to take
needless trouble.

The young master renewed some
acquaintances and made others, and spent a
week or two very pleasantly in the best society of
the metropolis, easily accessible to a wealthy,
well-bred young Southerner, with proper
introductions. Young women smiled on him, and
young men of convivial habits pressed their
hospitalities; but the memory of Charity's sweet,
strong face and clear blue eyes made him proof
against the blandishments of the one sex and the
persuasions of the other. Meanwhile he kept
Grandison supplied with pocket-money, and left
him mainly to his own devices. Every night when
Dick came in he hoped he might have to wait
upon himself, and every morning he looked
forward with pleasure to the prospect of making
his toilet unaided. His hopes, however, were
doomed to disappointment, for every night when
he came in Grandison was on hand with a
bootjack, and a nightcap mixed for his young
master as the colonel had taught him to mix it,
and every morning Grandison
appeared with his master's boots blacked and
his clothes brushed, and laid his linen out for the
day.

“Grandison,” said Dick one morning, after
finishing his toilet, “this is the chance of your life
to go around among your own people and see
how they live. Have you met any of them?”

When two weeks had passed without any
apparent effect of evil example upon Grandison,
Dick resolved to go on to Boston, where he
thought the atmosphere might prove more
favorable to his ends. After he had been at the
Revere House for a day or two without losing
Grandison, he decided upon slightly different
tactics.

Having ascertained from a city directory the
addresses of several well-known abolitionists, he
wrote them each a letter something like this: -

DEAR FRIEND AND BROTHER: -

A wicked slaveholder from Kentucky,
stopping at the Revere House, has dared to insult
the liberty-loving people of Boston by bringing
his slave into their midst. Shall this be tolerated?
Or shall steps be taken in the name of liberty to
rescue a fellow-man from bondage? For obvious
reasons I can only sign myself,

A FRIEND OF HUMANITY.

That his letter might have an opportunity to
prove effective, Dick made it a point to send
Grandison away from the hotel on various
errands. On one of these occasions Dick
watched him for quite a distance down the street.
Grandison had scarcely left the hotel when a
long-haired, sharp-featured man came out behind him,
followed him, soon overtook him, and kept along
beside him until they turned the next corner.
Dick's hopes were roused by this spectacle, but
sank correspondingly when Grandison returned
to the hotel. As Grandison said nothing about the
encounter, Dick hoped there might be some
self-consciousness behind this unexpected
reticence, the results of which might develop later on.

But Grandison was on hand again when his
master came back to the hotel at night, and was
in attendance again in the morning, with hot
water, to assist at his master's toilet. Dick sent
him on further errands from day to day, and upon
one occasion came squarely up to him - inadvertently
of course - while Grandison was engaged in
conversation with a young white man
in clerical garb. When Grandison saw Dick
approaching, he edged away from the preacher
and hastened toward his master, with a very
evident expression of relief upon his countenance.

“We'll be going back soon enough,” replied
Dick somewhat shortly, while he inwardly cursed
the stupidity of a slave who could be free and
would not, and registered
a secret vow that if he were unable to get rid of
Grandison without assassinating him, and were
therefore compelled to take him back to
Kentucky, he would see that Grandison got a
taste of an article of slavery that would make him
regret his wasted opportunities. Meanwhile he
determined to tempt his servant yet more
strongly.

“Grandison,” he said next morning, “I 'm
going away for a day or two, but I shall leave
you here. I shall lock up a hundred dollars in this
drawer and give you the key. If you need any of
it, use it and enjoy yourself, - spend it all if you
like, - for this is probably the last chance you'll
have for some time to be in a free State, and
you 'd better enjoy your liberty while you may.”

When he came back a couple of days later
and found the faithful Grandison at his post, and
the hundred dollars intact, Dick felt seriously
annoyed. His vexation was increased by the fact
that he could not express his feelings adequately.
He did not even scold Grandison; how could he,
indeed, find fault with one who so sensibly
recognized his true place in the economy of
civilization, and kept it with such touching
fidelity?

“I can't say a thing to him,” groaned Dick. “He
deserves a leather medal, made out of his own
hide tanned. I reckon I'll write to father and let
him know what a model servant he has given
me.”

He wrote his father a letter which made the
colonel swell with pride and pleasure. “I really
think,” the colonel observed to one of his friends,
“that Dick ought to have the nigger interviewed
by the Boston papers, so that they may see how
contented and happy our darkeys really are.”

Dick also wrote a long letter to Charity
Lomax, in which he said, among many other
things, that if she knew how hard he was
working, and under what difficulties, to
accomplish something serious for her sake, she
would no longer keep him in suspense, but
overwhelm him with love and admiration.

Having thus exhausted without result the more
obvious methods of getting rid of Grandison, and
diplomacy having also proved a failure, Dick was
forced to consider more radical measures. Of
course he might run away himself, and abandon
Grandison, but this would be merely to leave him
in the United States, where he was still a slave, and
where, with his notions of loyalty, he would
speedily be reclaimed. It was necessary, in order
to accomplish the purpose of his trip to the
North, to leave Grandison permanently in
Canada, where he would be legally free.

“I might extend my trip to Canada,” he
reflected, “but that would be too palpable. I
have it! I'll visit Niagara Falls on the way home,
and lose him on the Canada side. When he once
realizes that he is actually free, I'll warrant that
he'll stay.”

So the next day saw them westward bound,
and in due course of time, by the somewhat slow
conveyances of the period, they found
themselves at Niagara. Dick walked and drove
about the Falls for several days, taking Grandison
along with him on most occasions. One morning
they stood on the Canadian side, watching the
wild whirl of the waters below them.

“Grandison,” said Dick, raising his voice
above the roar of the cataract, “do you know
where you are now?”

“I 's wid you, Mars Dick; dat's all I keers.”

“You are now in Canada, Grandison, where
your people go when they run away from
their masters. If you wished, Grandison, you
might walk away from me this very minute, and I
could not lay my hand upon you to take you
back.”

Grandison looked around uneasily.

“Let's go back ober de ribber, Mars Dick. I's
feared I'll lose you ovuh heah, an' den I won'
hab no marster, an' won't nebber be able to git
back home no mo'.”

Discouraged, but not yet hopeless, Dick said,
a few minutes later, -

“Grandison, I 'm going up the road a bit, to
the inn over yonder. You stay here until I return.
I'll not be gone a great while.”

Grandison's eyes opened wide and he looked
somewhat fearful.

“Is dey any er dem dadblasted
abolitioners roun' heah, Mars Dick?”

“I don't imagine that there are,” replied his
master, hoping there might be. “But I 'm not
afraid of yourrunning away, Grandison. I only
wish I were,” he added to himself.

Dick walked leisurely down the road to
where the whitewashed inn, built of stone, with
true British solidity, loomed up through the trees
by the roadside. Arrived there he
ordered a glass of ale and a sandwich, and took
a seat at a table by a window, from which he
could see Grandison in the distance. For a while
he hoped that the seed he had sown might have
fallen on fertile ground, and that Grandison,
relieved from the restraining power of a master's
eye, and finding himself in a free country, might
get up and walk away; but the hope was vain, for
Grandison remained faithfully at his post, awaiting
his master's return. He had seated himself on a
broad flat stone, and, turning his eyes away from
the grand and awe-inspiring spectacle that lay
close at hand, was looking anxiously toward the
inn where his master sat cursing his ill-timed
fidelity.

By and by a girl came into the room to serve
his order, and Dick very naturally glanced at her;
and as she was young and pretty and remained in
attendance, it was some minutes before he
looked for Grandison. When he did so his faithful
servant had disappeared.

To pay his reckoning and go away without the
change was a matter quickly accomplished.
Retracing his footsteps toward the Falls, he saw,
to his great disgust, as he
approached the spot where he had left Grandison,
the familiar form of his servant stretched out on
the ground, his face to the sun, his mouth open,
sleeping the time away, oblivious alike to the
grandeur of the scenery, the thunderous roar of
the cataract, or the insidious voice of sentiment.

“Grandison,” soliloquized his master, as he
stood gazing down at his ebony encumbrance,
“I do not deserve to be an American citizen; I
ought not to have the advantages I possess over
you; and I certainly am not worthy of Charity
Lomax, if I am not smart enough to get rid of
you. I have an idea! You shall yet be free, and I
will be the instrument of your deliverance. Sleep
on, faithful and affectionate servitor, and dream
of the blue grass and the bright skies of old
Kentucky, for it is only in your dreams that you
will ever see them again!”

Dick retraced his footsteps towards the inn.
The young woman chanced to look out of the
window and saw the handsome young gentleman
she had waited on a few minutes before,
standing in the road a short distance away,
apparently engaged in earnest conversation with
a colored man employed as hostler
for the inn. She thought she saw something pass
from the white man to the other, but at that
moment her duties called her away from the
window, and when she looked out again the
young gentleman had disappeared, and the
hostler, with two other young men of the
neighborhood, one white and one colored, were
walking rapidly towards the Falls.

IV

Dick made the journey homeward alone, and
as rapidly as the conveyances of the day would
permit. As he drew near home his conduct in
going back without Grandison took on a more
serious aspect than it had borne at any previous
time, and although he had prepared the colonel
by a letter sent several days ahead, there was still
the prospect of a bad quarter of an hour with
him; not, indeed, that his father would upbraid
him, but he was likely to make searching
inquiries. And notwithstanding the vein of quiet
recklessness that had carried Dick through his
preposterous scheme, he was a very poor liar,
having rarely had occasion or inclination to tell
anything but the truth.
Any reluctance to meet his father was more than
offset, however, by a stronger force drawing him
homeward, for Charity Lomax must long since
have returned from her visit to her aunt in
Tennessee.

Dick got off easier than he had expected. He
told a straight story, and a truthful one, so far as
it went.

The colonel raged at first, but rage soon
subsided into anger, and anger moderated into
annoyance, and annoyance into a sort of
garrulous sense of injury. The colonel thought he
had been hardly used; he had trusted this negro,
and he had broken faith. Yet, after all, he did not
blame Grandison so much as he did the
abolitionists, who were undoubtedly at the
bottom of it.

As for Charity Lomax, Dick told her,
privately of course, that he had run his father's
man, Grandison, off to Canada, and left him
there.

“Oh, Dick,” she had said with shuddering
alarm, “what have you done? If they knew it
they'd send you to the penitentiary, like they did
that Yankee.”

“But they don't know it,” he had replied
seriously; adding, with an injured tone, “you
don't seem to appreciate my heroism like you
did that of the Yankee; perhaps it's because I
was n't caught and sent to the penitentiary. I
thought you wanted me to do it.”

“Why, Dick Owens!” she exclaimed. “You
know I never dreamed of any such outrageous
proceeding.

“But I presume I'll have to marry you,” she
concluded, after some insistence on Dick's part,
“if only to take care of you. You are too
reckless for anything; and a man who goes
chasing all over the North, being entertained by
New York and Boston society and having
negroes to throw away, needs some one to look
after him.”

“It's a most remarkable thing,” replied Dick
fervently, “that your views correspond exactly
with my profoundest convictions. It proves
beyond question that we were made for one
another.”

They were married three weeks later. As
each of them had just returned from a journey,
they spent their honeymoon at home.

A week after the wedding they were seated,
one afternoon, on the piazza of the colonel's
house, where Dick had taken his bride, when a
negro from the yard ran down the lane and threw
open the big gate for the colonel's buggy to
enter. The colonel was not alone. Beside him,
ragged and travel-stained, bowed with
weariness, and upon his face a haggard look that
told of hardship and privation, sat the lost
Grandison.

The colonel alighted at the steps.

“Take the lines, Tom,” he said to the man who
had opened the gate, “and drive round to the
barn. Help Grandison down, - poor devil, he 's
so stiff he can hardly move! - and get a tub of
water and wash him and rub him down, and feed
him, and give him a big drink of whiskey, and
then let him come round and see his young
master and his new mistress.”

The colonel's face wore an expression
compounded of joy and indignation, - joy at the
restoration of a valuable piece of property;
indignation for reasons he proceeded to state.

“It 's astounding, the depths of depravity the
human heart is capable of! I was coming along
the road three miles away, when I heard some
one call me from the roadside.
I pulled up the mare, and who should come out
of the woods but Grandison. The poor nigger
could hardly crawl along, with the help of a
broken limb. I was never more astonished in my
life. You could have knocked me down with a
feather. He seemed pretty far gone, - he could
hardly talk above a whisper, - and I had to give
him a mouthful of whiskey to brace him up so he
could tell his story. It's just as I thought from the
beginning, Dick; Grandison had no notion of
running away; he knew when he was well off,
and where his friends were. All the persuasions
of abolition liars and runaway niggers did not
move him. But the desperation of those fanatics
knew no bounds; their guilty consciences gave
them no rest. They got the notion somehow that
Grandison belonged to a nigger-catcher, and had
been brought North as a spy to help capture
ungrateful runaway servants. They actually
kidnaped him - just think of it! - and gagged
him and bound him and threw him rudely into a
wagon, and carried him into the gloomy depths
of a Canadian forest, and locked him in a lonely
hut, and fed him on bread and water for three
weeks. One of the
scoundrels wanted to kill him, and persuaded the
others that it ought to be done; but they got to
quarreling about how they should do it, and
before they had their minds made up Grandison
escaped, and, keeping his back steadily to the
North Star, made his way, after suffering
incredible hardships, back to the old plantation,
back to his master, his friends, and his home.
Why, it's as good as one of Scott's novels! Mr.
Simms or some other one of our Southern
authors ought to write it up.”

“Don't you think, sir,” suggested Dick, who
had calmly smoked his cigar throughout the
colonel's animated recital, “that that kidnaping
yarn sounds a little improbable? Is n't there
some more likely explanation?”

“Nonsense, Dick; it's the gospel truth! Those
infernal abolitionists are capable of
anything - everything! Just think of their locking
the poor, faithful nigger up, beating him, kicking
him, depriving him of his liberty, keeping him on
bread and water for three long, lonesome weeks,
and he all the time pining for the old plantation!”

There were almost tears in the colonel's eyes
at the picture of Grandison's sufferings
that he conjured up. Dick still professed to be
slightly skeptical, and met Charity's severely
questioning eye with bland unconsciousness.

The colonel killed the fatted calf for Grandison,
and for two or three weeks the returned
wanderer's life was a slave's dream of pleasure.
His fame spread throughout the county, and the
colonel gave him a permanent place among the
house servants, where he could always have him
conveniently at hand to relate his adventures to
admiring visitors.

About three weeks after Grandison's return
the colonel's faith in sable humanity was
rudely shaken, and its foundations almost
broken up. He came near losing his belief
in the fidelity of the negro to his master, -
the servile virtue most highly prized and
most sedulously cultivated by the colonel and
his kind. One Monday morning Grandison
was missing. And not only Grandison, but
his wife, Betty the maid; his mother, aunt
Eunice; his father, uncle Ike; his brothers,
Tom and John, and his little sister Elsie,
were likewise absent from the plantation;
and a hurried search and inquiry in the
neighborhood resulted in no information as to
their whereabouts. So much valuable property
could not be lost without an effort to recover it,
and the wholesale nature of the transaction
carried consternation to the hearts of those whose
ledgers were chiefly bound in black. Extremely
energetic measures were taken by the colonel and
his friends. The fugitives were traced, and
followed from point to point, on their northward
run through Ohio. Several times the hunters were
close upon their heels, but the magnitude of the
escaping party begot unusual vigilance on the part
of those who sympathized with the fugitives, and
strangely enough, the underground railroad
seemed to have had its tracks cleared and signals
set for this particular train. Once, twice, the
colonel thought he had them, but they slipped
through his fingers.

One last glimpse he caught of his vanishing
property, as he stood, accompanied by a United
States marshal, on a wharf at a port on the south
shore of Lake Erie. On the stern of a small
steamboat which was receding rapidly from the
wharf, with her nose pointing toward
Canada, there stood a group of familiar dark
faces, and the look they cast backward was not
one of longing for the fleshpots of Egypt. The
colonel saw Grandison point him out to one of
the crew of the vessel, who waved his hand
derisively toward the colonel. The latter shook
his fist impotently - and the incident was closed.

UNCLE WELLINGTON'S WIVES
I

UNCLE WELLINGTON BRABOY was so
deeply absorbed in thought as he walked slowly
homeward from the weekly meeting of the Union
League, that he let his pipe go out, a fact of
which he remained oblivious until he had reached
the little frame house in the suburbs of Patesville,
where he lived with aunt Milly, his wife. On this
particular occasion the club had been addressed
by a visiting brother from the North, Professor
Patterson, a tall, well-formed mulatto, who wore
a perfectly fitting suit of broadcloth, a shiny silk
hat, and linen of dazzling whiteness, - in short, a
gentleman of such distinguished appearance that
the doors and windows of the offices and stores
on Front Street were filled with curious observers
as he passed through that thoroughfare in the
early part of the day. This polished stranger was
a traveling organizer of Masonic lodges, but he also
claimed to be a high officer in the Union League,
and had been invited to lecture before the local
chapter of that organization at Patesville.

The lecture had been largely attended, and
uncle Wellington Braboy had occupied a seat
just in front of the platform. The subject of the
lecture was “The Mental, Moral, Physical,
Political, Social, and Financial Improvement of
the Negro Race in America,” a theme much
dwelt upon, with slight variations, by colored
orators. For to this struggling people, then as
now, the problem of their uncertain present and
their doubtful future was the chief concern of life.
The period was the hopeful one. The Federal
Government retained some vestige of authority in
the South, and the newly emancipated race
cherished the delusion that under the
Constitution, that enduring rock on which our
liberties are founded, and under the equal laws it
purported to guarantee, they would enter upon
the era of freedom and opportunity which their
Northern friends had inaugurated with such
solemn sanctions. The speaker pictured in
eloquent language the state of ideal equality and
happiness enjoyed by colored people
at the North: how they sent their children to
school with the white children; how they sat by
white people in the churches and theatres, ate
with them in the public restaurants, and buried
their dead in the same cemeteries. The professor
waxed eloquent with the development of his
theme, and, as a finishing touch to an alluring
picture, assured the excited audience that the
intermarriage of the races was common, and that
he himself had espoused a white woman.

Uncle Wellington Braboy was a deeply
interested listener. He had heard something of
these facts before, but his information had
always come in such vague and questionable
shape that he had paid little attention to it. He
knew that the Yankees had freed the slaves, and
that runaway negroes had always gone to the
North to seek liberty; any such equality,
however, as the visiting brother had depicted,
was more than uncle Wellington had ever
conceived as actually existing anywhere in the
world. At first he felt inclined to doubt the truth
of the speaker's statements; but the cut of his
clothes, the eloquence of his language, and the
flowing length of his whiskers, were so far
superior to anything
uncle Wellington had ever met among the
colored people of his native State, that he felt
irresistibly impelled to the conviction that nothing
less than the advantages claimed for the North by
the visiting brother could have produced such an
exquisite flower of civilization. Any lingering
doubts uncle Wellington may have felt were
entirely dispelled by the courtly bow and cordial
grasp of the hand with which the visiting brother
acknowledged the congratulations showered
upon him by the audience at the close of his
address.

The more uncle Wellington's mind dwelt upon
the professor's speech, the more attractive
seemed the picture of Northern life presented.
Uncle Wellington possessed in large measure the
imaginative faculty so freely bestowed by nature
upon the race from which the darker half of his
blood was drawn. He had indulged in occasional
day-dreams of an ideal state of social equality,
but his wildest flights of fancy had never located it
nearer than heaven, and he had felt some
misgivings about its practical working even there.
Its desirability he had never doubted, and the
speech of the evening before had given a local
habitation and a name to the forms his
imagination had bodied forth. Giving full rein to his
fancy, he saw in the North a land flowing with
milk and honey, - a land peopled by noble men
and beautiful women, among whom colored men
and women moved with the ease and grace of
acknowledged right. Then he placed himself in the
foreground of the picture. What a fine figure he
would have made in the world if he had been
born at the free North! He imagined himself
dressed like the professor, and passing the
contribution-box in a white church; and most
pleasant of his dreams, and the hardest to realize
as possible, was that of the gracious white lady he
might have called wife. Uncle Wellington was a
mulatto, and his features were those of his white
father, though tinged with the hue of his mother's
race; and as he lifted the kerosene lamp at
evening, and took a long look at his image in the
little mirror over the mantelpiece, he said to
himself that he was a very good-looking man, and
could have adorned a much higher sphere in life
than that in which the accident of birth had placed
him. He fell asleep and dreamed that he lived in a
two-story brick house, with a spacious flower
garden in front,
the whole inclosed by a high iron fence; that he
kept a carriage and servants, and never did a
stroke of work. This was the highest style of
living in Patesville, and he could conceive of
nothing finer.

Uncle Wellington slept later than usual the
next morning, and the sunlight was pouring in at
the open window of the bedroom, when his
dreams were interrupted by the voice of his wife,
in tones meant to be harsh, but which no
ordinary degree of passion could rob of their
native unctuousness.

Uncle Wellington rolled over, yawned
cavernously, stretched himself, and with a
muttered protest got out of bed and put on his
clothes. Aunt Milly had prepared a smoking
breakfast of hominy and fried bacon, the odor of
which was very grateful to his nostrils.

“Is breakfus' done ready?” he inquired,
tentatively, as he came into the kitchen and
glanced at the table.

“No, it ain't ready, an' 't ain't gwine ter be
ready 'tel you tote dat wood an' water in,”
replied aunt Milly severely, as she poured two
teacups of boiling water on two tablespoonfuls of
ground coffee.

Uncle Wellington went down to the spring and
got a pail of water, after which he brought in
some oak logs for the fireplace and some
lightwood for kindling. Then he drew a chair
towards the table and started to sit down.

“I don' see no use 'n washin' 'em so much,”
replied Wellington wearily. “Dey gits dirty ag'in
right off, an' den you got ter wash 'em ovuh ag'in;
it 's jes' pilin' up wuk what don' fetch in nuffin'. De
dirt don' show nohow, 'n' I don' see no
advantage in bein' black, ef you got to keep on
washin' yo' face 'n' han's jes' lack w'ite folks.” He
nevertheless performed his ablutions in a
perfunctory way, and resumed his seat at the
breakfast-table.

“Ole 'oman,” he asked, after the edge of his
appetite had been taken off, “how would you
lack ter live at de Norf?”

“He come f'm de Norf,” said uncle
Wellington, “an' he 'speunced it all hisse'f.”

“Well, he can't make me b'lieve it,” she
rejoined, with a shake of her head.

“An' you would n' lack ter go up dere an' 'joy
all dese privileges?” asked uncle Wellington, with
some degree of earnestness.

The old woman laughed until her sides shook.
“Who gwine ter take me up dere?” she
inquired.

“You got de money yo'se'f.”

“I ain' got no money fer ter was'e,” she replied
shortly, becoming serious at once; and with that
the subject was dropped.

Uncle Wellington pulled a hoe from under the
house, and took his way wearily to the potato
patch. He did not feel like working, but aunt
Milly was the undisputed head of the
establishment, and he did not dare to openly
neglect his work. In fact, he regarded work at
any time as a disagreeable necessity to be
avoided as much as possible.

His wife was cast in a different mould.
Externally she would have impressed the casual
observer as a neat, well-preserved, and
good-looking black woman, of middle age,
every curve of whose ample figure - and her
figure was all curves - was suggestive of repose.
So far from being indolent, or even deliberate in
her movements, she was the most active and
energetic woman in the town. She went through
the physical exercises of a prayer-meeting with
astonishing vigor. It was exhilarating to see her
wash a shirt, and a study to watch her do it up.
A quick jerk shook out the dampened garment;
one pass of her ample palm spread it over the
ironing-board, and a few well-directed strokes
with the iron accomplished what would have
occupied the ordinary laundress for half an hour.

To this uncommon, and in uncle Wellington's
opinion unnecessary and unnatural activity, his
own habits were a steady protest. If aunt Milly
had been willing to support him in idleness, he
would have acquiesced without a murmur in her
habits of industry. This she would not do, and,
moreover, insisted on his working at least half the
time. If she had invested the proceeds of her
labor in rich food and fine clothing, he might have
endured it better; but to her passion for
work was added a most detestable thrift. She
absolutely refused to pay for Wellington's clothes,
and required him to furnish a certain proportion of
the family supplies. Her savings were carefully put
by, and with them she had bought and paid for
the modest cottage which she and her husband
occupied. Under her careful hand it was always
neat and clean; in summer the little yard was gay
with bright-colored flowers, and woe to the
heedless pickaninny who should stray into her
yard and pluck a rose or a verbena! In a stout
oaken chest under her bed she kept a capacious
stocking, into which flowed a steady stream of
fractional currency. She carried the key to this
chest in her pocket, a proceeding regarded by
uncle Wellington with no little disfavor. He was of
the opinion - an opinion he would not have
dared to assert in her presence - that his wife's
earnings were his own property; and he looked
upon this stocking as a drunkard's wife might
regard the saloon which absorbed her husband's
wages.

Uncle Wellington hurried over the potato
patch on the morning of the conversation above
recorded, and as soon as he saw aunt
Milly go away with a basket of clothes on her
head, returned to the house, put on his coat, and
went uptown.

He directed his steps to a small frame building
fronting on the main street of the village, at a
point where the street was intersected by one of
the several creeks meandering through the town,
cooling the air, providing numerous swimming-holes
for the amphibious small boy, and furnishing
waterpower for grist-mills and saw-mills. The
rear of the building rested on long brick pillars,
built up from the bottom of the steep bank of the
creek, while the front was level with the street.
This was the office of Mr. Matthew Wright, the
sole representative of the colored race at the bar
of Chinquapin County. Mr. Wright came of an
“old issue” free colored family, in which, though
the negro blood was present in an attenuated
strain, a line of free ancestry could be traced
beyond the Revolutionary War. He had enjoyed
exceptional opportunities, and enjoyed the
distinction of being the first, and for a long time
the only colored lawyer in North Carolina. His
services were frequently called into requisition by
impecunious people of his own
race; when they had money they went to white
lawyers, who, they shrewdly conjectured, would
have more influence with judge or jury than a
colored lawyer, however able.

Uncle Wellington found Mr. Wright in his
office. Having inquired after the health of the
lawyer's family and all his relations in detail, uncle
Wellington asked for a professional opinion.

“Under the common law, which in default of
special legislative enactment is the law of North
Carolina, the personal property of the wife
belongs to her husband.”

“But dat don' jes' tech de p'int, suh. I wuz
axin' 'bout money.”

“You see, uncle Wellington, your education
has not rendered you familiar with legal
phraseology. The term ‘personal property’ or
‘estate’ embraces, according to Blackstone, all
property other than land, and therefore includes
money. Any money a man's wife has is his,
constructively, and will be recognized
as his actually, as soon as he can secure
possession of it.”

“That is to say, it 's yours when you get it. It
is n't yours so that the law will help you get it; but
on the other hand, when you once lay your hands
on it, it is yours so that the law won't take it
away from you.”

Uncle Wellington nodded to express his full
comprehension of the law as expounded by Mr.
Wright, but scratched his head in a way that
expressed some disappointment. The law
seemed to wobble. Instead of enabling him to
stand up fearlessly and demand his own, it threw
him back upon his own efforts; and the prospect
of his being able to overpower or outwit aunt
Milly by any ordinary means was very poor.

He did not leave the office, but hung around
awhile as though there were something further he
wished to speak about. Finally, after some
discursive remarks about the crops and politics,
he asked, in an offhand, disinterested manner, as
though the thought had just occurred to him: -

“Mistah Wright, w'ile's we're talkin' 'bout
law matters, what do it cos' ter git a defoce?”

“That depends upon circumstances. It isn't
altogether a matter of expense. Have you and
aunt Milly been having trouble?”

“Oh no, suh; I was jes' a-wond'rin'.”

“You see,” continued the lawyer, who was
fond of talking, and had nothing else to do for
the moment, “a divorce is not an easy thing to
get in this State under any circumstances. It used
to be the law that divorce could be granted only
by special act of the legislature; and it is but
recently that the subject has been relegated to
the jurisdiction of the courts.”

Uncle Wellington understood a part of this,
but the answer had not been exactly to the point
in his mind.

“That would depend on what you quarreled
about. It's pretty hard work to answer general
questions in a particular way. If you merely
wished to separate, it would n't be necessary to
get a divorce; but if you should want to marry
again, you would have to be
divorced, or else you would be guilty of bigamy,
and could be sent to the penitentiary. But, by the
way, uncle Wellington, when were you married?”

“I got married 'fo' de wah, when I was livin'
down on Rockfish Creek.”

“When you were in slavery?”

“Yas, suh.”

“Did you have your marriage registered after
the surrender?”

“No, suh; never knowed nuffin' 'bout dat.”

After the war, in North Carolina and other
States, the freed people who had sustained to
each other the relation of husband and wife as it
existed among slaves, were required by law to
register their consent to continue in the marriage
relation. By this simple expedient their former
marriages of convenience received the sanction
of law, and their children the seal of legitimacy.
In many cases, however, where the parties lived
in districts remote from the larger towns, the
ceremony was neglected, or never heard of by
the freedmen.

“Well,” said the lawyer, “if that is the case,
and you and aunt Milly should disagree, it
wouldn't be necessary for you to get a divorce,
even if you should want to marry again. You
were never legally married.”

“So Milly ain't my lawful wife, den?”

“She may be your wife in one sense of the
word, but not in such a sense as to render you
liable to punishment for bigamy if you should
marry another woman. But I hope you will never
want to do anything of the kind, for you have a
very good wife now.”

Uncle Wellington went away thoughtfully, but
with a feeling of unaccustomed lightness and
freedom. He had not felt so free since the
memorable day when he had first heard of the
Emancipation Proclamation. On leaving the
lawyer's office, he called at the workshop of one
of his friends, Peter Williams, a shoemaker by
trade, who had a brother living in Ohio.

“Is you hearn f'm Sam lately?” uncle
Wellington inquired, after the conversation had
drifted through the usual generalities.

“He says he gittin' on monst'us well. He 'low
ez how he make five dollars a day w'ite-washin',
an' have all he kin do.”

The shoemaker related various details of his
brother's prosperity, and uncle Wellington
returned home in a very thoughtful mood,
revolving in his mind a plan of future action. This
plan had been vaguely assuming form ever since
the professor's lecture, and the events of the
morning had brought out the detail in bold relief.

Two days after the conversation with the
shoemaker, aunt Milly went, in the afternoon, to
visit a sister of hers who lived several miles out in
the country. During her absence, which lasted
until nightfall, uncle Wellington went uptown and
purchased a cheap oilcloth valise from a shrewd
son of Israel, who had penetrated to this locality
with a stock of notions and cheap clothing. Uncle
Wellington had his purchase done up in brown
paper, and took the parcel under his arm.
Arrived at home he unwrapped the valise, and
thrust into its capacious jaws his best suit of
clothes, some underwear, and a few other small
articles for personal use and adornment. Then he
carried the valise out into the yard, and, first
looking cautiously around to see if there was any
one in sight, concealed it in a clump of bushes
in a corner of the yard.

It may be inferred from this proceeding that
uncle Wellington was preparing for a step of
some consequence. In fact, he had fully made up
his mind to go to the North; but he still lacked the
most important requisite for traveling with
comfort, namely, the money to pay his expenses.
The idea of tramping the distance which
separated him from the promised land of liberty
and equality had never occurred to him. When a
slave, he had several times been importuned by
fellow servants to join them in the attempt to
escape from bondage, but he had never wanted
his freedom badly enough to walk a thousand
miles for it; if he could have gone to Canada by
stage-coach, or by rail, or on horseback, with
stops for regular meals, he would probably have
undertaken the trip. The funds he now needed for
his journey were in aunt Milly's chest. He had
thought a great deal about his right to this money.
It was his wife's savings, and he had never dared
to dispute, openly, her right to exercise exclusive
control over what she earned; but the lawyer had
assured him of his right to the money, of which he
was already constructively in possession, and he
had therefore determined
to possess himself actually of the coveted
stocking. It was impracticable for him to get the
key of the chest. Aunt Milly kept it in her pocket
by day and under her pillow at night. She was a
light sleeper, and, if not awakened by the
abstraction of the key, would certainly have been
disturbed by the unlocking of the chest. But one
alternative remained, and that was to break open
the chest in her absence.

There was a revival in progress at the colored
Methodist church. Aunt Milly was as energetic in
her religion as in other respects, and had not
missed a single one of the meetings. She returned
at nightfall from her visit to the country and
prepared a frugal supper. Uncle Wellington did
not eat as heartily as usual. Aunt Milly perceived
his want of appetite, and spoke of it. He explained
it by saying that he did not feel very well.

“Well, you kin stay of you mineter. Good
preachin' 'u'd make you feel better, but ef you
ain't gwine, don' fergit ter tote in some wood an'
lighterd 'fo' you go ter bed. De moon is shinin'
bright, an' you can't have no 'scuse 'bout not
bein' able ter see.”

Uncle Wellington followed her out to the gate,
and watched her receding form until it
disappeared in the distance. Then he reentered
the house with a quick step, and taking a hatchet
from a corner of the room, drew the chest from
under the bed. As he applied the hatchet to the
fastenings, a thought struck him, and by the
flickering light of the pine-knot blazing on the
hearth, a look of hesitation might have been seen
to take the place of the determined expression his
face had worn up to that time. He had argued
himself into the belief that his present action was
lawful and justifiable. Though this conviction had
not prevented him from trembling in every limb, as
though he were committing a mere vulgar theft, it
had still nerved him to the deed. Now even his
moral courage began to weaken. The lawyer had
told him that his wife's property was his own; in
taking it he was therefore only exercising his
lawful right.
But at the point of breaking open the chest, it
occurred to him that he was taking this money in
order to get away from aunt Milly, and that he
justified his desertion of her by the lawyer's
opinion that she was not his lawful wife. If she
was not his wife, then he had no right to take the
money; if she was his wife, he had no right to
desert her, and would certainly have no right to
marry another woman. His scheme was about to
go to shipwreck on this rock, when another idea
occurred to him.

“De lawyer say dat in one sense er de word
de ole 'omen is my wife, an' in anudder sense er
de word she ain't my wife. Ef I goes ter de Norf
an' marry a w'ite 'omen, I ain't commit no
brigamy, 'caze in dat sense er de word she ain't
my wife; but ef I takes dis money, I ain't stealin'
it, 'caze in dat sense er de word she is my wife.
Dat 'splains all de trouble away.”

Having reached this ingenious conclusion,
uncle Wellington applied the hatchet vigorously,
soon loosened the fastenings of the chest, and
with trembling hands extracted from its depths a
capacious blue cotton stocking. He emptied the
stocking on the table.
His first impulse was to take the whole, but again
there arose in his mind a doubt - a very
obtrusive, unreasonable doubt, but a doubt,
nevertheless - of the absolute rectitude of his
conduct; and after a moment's hesitation he
hurriedly counted the money - it was in bills of
small denominations - and found it to be about
two hundred and fifty dollars. He then divided it
into two piles of one hundred and twenty-five
dollars each. He put one pile into his pocket,
returned the remainder to the stocking, and
replaced it where he had found it. He then closed
the chest and shoved it under the bed. After
having arranged the fire so that it could safely be
left burning, he took a last look around the room,
and went out into the moonlight, locking the door
behind him, and hanging the key on a nail in the
wall, where his wife would be likely to look for
it. He then secured his valise from behind the
bushes, and left the yard. As he passed by the
wood-pile, he said to himself: -

He hastened through the quiet streets,
avoiding the few people who were abroad at that
hour, and soon reached the railroad station, from
which a North-bound train left at nine o'clock.
He went around to the dark side of the train, and
climbed into a second-class car, where he shrank
into the darkest corner and turned his face away
from the dim light of the single dirty lamp. There
were no passengers in the car except one or two
sleepy negroes, who had got on at some other
station, and a white man who had gone into the
car to smoke, accompanied by a gigantic
bloodhound.

Finally the train crept out of the station. From
the window uncle Wellington looked out upon
the familiar cabins and turpentine stills, the new
barrel factory, the brickyard where he had once
worked for some time; and as the train rattled
through the outskirts of the town, he saw
gleaming in the moonlight the white headstones of
the colored cemetery where his only daughter
had been buried several years before.

Presently the conductor came around. Uncle
Wellington had not bought a ticket, and the
conductor collected a cash fare. He was not
acquainted with uncle Wellington,
but had just had a drink at the saloon near the
depot, and felt at peace with all mankind.

“Where are you going, uncle?” he inquired
carelessly.

Uncle Wellington's face assumed the ashen hue
which does duty for pallor in dusky
countenances, and his knees began to tremble.
Controlling his voice as well as he could, he
replied that he was going up to Jonesboro, the
terminus of the railroad, to work for a gentleman
at that place. He felt immensely relieved when the
conductor pocketed the fare, picked up his
lantern, and moved away. It was very
unphilosophical and very absurd that a man who
was only doing right should feel like a thief, shrink
from the sight of other people, and lie
instinctively. Fine distinctions were not in uncle
Wellington's line, but he was struck by the
unreasonableness of his feelings, and still more by
the discomfort they caused him. By and by,
however, the motion of the train made him
drowsy; his thoughts all ran together in confusion;
and he fell asleep with his head on his valise, and
one hand in his pocket, clasped tightly around the
roll of money.

II

The train from Pittsburg drew into the Union
Depot at Groveland, Ohio, one morning in the
spring of 187-, with bell ringing and engine
puffing; and from a smoking-car emerged the
form of uncle Wellington Braboy, a little dusty
and travel-stained, and with a sleepy look about
his eyes. He mingled in the crowd, and, valise in
hand, moved toward the main exit from the
depot. There were several tracks to be crossed,
and more than once a watchman snatched him
out of the way of a baggage-truck, or a train
backing into the depot. He at length reached the
door, beyond which, and as near as the
regulations would permit, stood a number of
hackmen, vociferously soliciting patronage. One
of them, a colored man, soon secured several
passengers. As he closed the door after the last
one he turned to uncle Wellington, who stood
near him on the sidewalk, looking about
irresolutely.

“Is you goin' uptown?” asked the hackman,
as he prepared to mount the box.

“Yas, suh.”

“I'll take you up fo' a quahtah, ef you
want ter git up here an' ride on de box wid me.”

Uncle Wellington accepted the offer and
mounted the box. The hackman whipped up his
horses, the carriage climbed the steep hill leading
up to the town, and the passengers inside were
soon deposited at their hotels.

“Whereabouts do you want to go?” asked
the hackman of uncle Wellington, when the
carriage was emptied of its last passengers.

“I want ter go ter Brer Sam Williams's,” said
Wellington.

“What 's his street an' number?”

Uncle Wellington did not know the street and
number, and the hackman had to explain to him
the mystery of numbered houses, to which he
was a total stranger.

“I reckon I knows de man,” said the hackman.
“I 'spec' he 's changed his name. De man I
knows is name' Johnson. He b'longs ter my
chu'ch. I'm gwine out dat way ter git a passenger
fer de ten o'clock train, an' I'll take you by
dere.”

They followed one of the least handsome
streets of the city for more than a mile, turned into
a cross street, and drew up before a small frame
house, from the front of which a sign, painted in
white upon a black background, announced to
the reading public, in letters inclined to each other
at various angles, that whitewashing and
kalsomining were “dun” there. A knock at the
door brought out a slatternly looking colored
woman. She had evidently been disturbed at her
toilet, for she held a comb in one hand, and the
hair on one side of her head stood out loosely,
while on the other side it was braided close to her
head. She called her husband, who proved to be
the Patesville shoemaker's brother. The hackman
introduced the traveler, whose name he had
learned on the way out, collected his quarter, and
drove away.

Mr. Johnson, the shoemaker's brother,
welcomed uncle Wellington to Groveland, and
listened with eager delight to the news of the old
town, from which he himself had run away many
years before, and followed the North Star to
Groveland. He had changed his name from
“Williams” to “Johnson,” on account of the
Fugitive Slave Law, which,
at the time of his escape from bondage, had
rendered it advisable for runaway slaves to court
obscurity. After the war he had retained the
adopted name. Mrs. Johnson prepared breakfast
for her guest, who ate it with an appetite
sharpened by his journey. After breakfast he
went to bed, and slept until late in the afternoon.

After supper Mr. Johnson took uncle
Wellington to visit some of the neighbors who
had come from North Carolina before the war.
They all expressed much pleasure at meeting
“Mr. Braboy,” a title which at first sounded a little
odd to uncle Wellington. At home he had been
“Wellin'ton,” “Brer Wellin'ton,” or “uncle
Wellin'ton;” it was a novel experience to be
called “Mister,” and he set it down, with secret
satisfaction, as one of the first fruits of Northern
liberty.

“Would you lack ter look 'roun' de town a
little?” asked Mr. Johnson at breakfast next
morning. “I ain' got no job dis mawnin', an' I kin
show you some er de sights.”

Uncle Wellington acquiesced in this
arrangement, and they walked up to the corner
to the street-car line. In a few moments a car
passed. Mr. Johnson jumped on the
moving car, and uncle Wellington followed his
example, at the risk of life or limb, as it was his
first experience of street cars.

There was only one vacant seat in the car and
that was between two white women in the
forward end. Mr. Johnson motioned to the seat,
but Wellington shrank from walking between
those two rows of white people, to say nothing of
sitting between the two women, so he remained
standing in the rear part of the car. A moment
later, as the car rounded a short curve, he was
pitched sidewise into the lap of a stout woman
magnificently attired in a ruffled blue calico gown.
The lady colored up, and uncle Wellington, as he
struggled to his feet amid the laughter of the
passengers, was absolutely helpless with
embarrassment, until the conductor came up
behind him and pushed him toward the vacant
place.

“Sit down, will you,” he said; and before uncle
Wellington could collect himself, he was seated
between the two white women. Everybody in the
car seemed to be looking at him. But he came to
the conclusion, after he had pulled himself
together and reflected a few moments, that he
would find this
method of locomotion pleasanter when he got
used to it, and then he could score one more
glorious privilege gained by his change of
residence.

They got off at the public square, in the heart of
the city, where there were flowers and statues,
and fountains playing. Mr. Johnson pointed out
the court-house, the post-office, the jail, and
other public buildings fronting on the square. They
visited the market near by, and from an elevated
point, looked down upon the extensive lumber
yards and factories that were the chief sources of
the city's prosperity. Beyond these they could see
the fleet of ships that lined the coal and iron ore
docks of the harbor. Mr. Johnson, who was quite
a fluent talker, enlarged upon the wealth and
prosperity of the city; and Wellington, who had never
before been in a town of more than three thousand
inhabitants, manifested sufficient interest and wonder
to satisfy the most exacting
cicerone.
They called at the office of a colored lawyer and
member of the legislature, formerly from North
Carolina, who, scenting a new constituent and a
possible client, greeted the stranger warmly, and
in flowing speech pointed out
the superior advantages of life at the North, citing
himself as an illustration of the possibilities of life
in a country really free. As they wended their
way homeward to dinner uncle Wellington, with
quickened pulse and rising hopes, felt that this
was indeed the promised land, and that it must be
flowing with milk and honey.

Uncle Wellington remained at the residence of
Mr. Johnson for several weeks before making
any effort to find employment. He spent this
period in looking about the city. The most
commonplace things possessed for him the
charm of novelty, and he had come prepared to
admire. Shortly after his arrival, he had offered to
pay for his board, intimating at the same time that
he had plenty of money. Mr. Johnson declined to
accept anything from him for board, and
expressed himself as being only too proud to
have Mr. Braboy remain in the house on the
footing of an honored guest, until he had settled
himself. He lightened in some degree, however,
the burden of obligation under which a prolonged
stay on these terms would have placed his guest,
by soliciting from the latter occasional small
loans, until uncle Wellington's roll of money
began to lose its plumpness, and with an empty
pocket staring him in the face, he felt the
necessity of finding something to do.

During his residence in the city he had met
several times his first acquaintance, Mr. Peterson,
the hackman, who from time to time inquired how
he was getting along. On one of these occasions
Wellington mentioned his willingness to accept
employment. As good luck would have it, Mr.
Peterson knew of a vacant situation. He had
formerly been coachman for a wealthy gentleman
residing on Oakwood Avenue, but had resigned
the situation to go into business for himself. His
place had been filled by an Irishman, who had just
been discharged for drunkenness, and the
gentleman that very day had sent word to Mr.
Peterson, asking him if he could recommend a
competent and trustworthy coachman.

Next morning Wellington blacked his shoes
carefully, put on a clean collar, and with the aid
of Mrs. Johnson tied his cravat in a jaunty bow
which gave him quite a sprightly air and a much
younger look than his years warranted. Mr.
Peterson called for him at eight o'clock. After
traversing several cross streets they turned into
Oakwood Avenue and walked along the finest
part of it for about half a mile. The handsome
houses of this famous avenue, the stately trees,
the widespreading lawns, dotted with flower
beds, fountains and statuary, made up a picture
so far surpassing anything in Wellington's
experience as to fill him with an almost
oppressive sense of its beauty.

They went down a street running at right
angles to the avenue, and turned into the rear of
the corner lot. A large building of pressed brick,
trimmed with stone, loomed up before them.

“Do de gemman lib in dis house?” asked
Wellington, gazing with awe at the front of the
building.

“No, dat's de barn,” said Mr. Peterson with
good-natured contempt; and leading the way
past a clump of shrubbery to the dwelling-house,
he went up the back steps and rang the
door-bell.

The ring was answered by a buxom
Irishwoman, of a natural freshness of complexion
deepened to a fiery red by the heat of a kitchen
range. Wellington thought he had seen her
before, but his mind had received so many new
impressions lately that it was a minute or two
before he recognized in her the lady whose lap
he had involuntarily occupied for a moment on
his first day in Groveland.

“Faith,” she exclaimed as she admitted them,
“an' it 's mighty glad I am to see ye ag'in, Misther
Payterson! An' how hev ye be'n, Misther
Payterson, sence I see ye lahst?”

“Oh yis, as well as a decent woman could do
wid a drunken baste about the place like the
lahst coachman. O Misther Payterson, it would
make yer heart bleed to see the way the
spalpeen cut up a-Saturday! But Misther Todd
discharged 'im the same avenin', widout a
characther, bad 'cess to 'im, an' we 've had no
coachman sence at all, at all. An' it's sorry
I am” -

The lady's flow of eloquence was interrupted
at this point by the appearance of Mr. Todd
himself, who had been informed of the men's
arrival. He asked some questions in regard to
Wellington's qualifications and former
experience, and in view of his recent arrival in the
city was willing to accept Mr. Peterson's
recommendation instead of a reference. He said
a few words about the nature of the work, and
stated his willingness to pay Wellington the
wages formerly allowed Mr. Peterson, thirty
dollars a month and board and lodging.

This handsome offer was eagerly accepted,
and it was agreed that Wellington's term of
service should begin immediately. Mr. Peterson,
being familiar with the work, and financially
interested, conducted the new coachman through
the stables and showed him what he would have
to do. The silver-mounted harness, the variety of
carriages, the names of which he learned for the
first time, the arrangements for feeding and
watering the horses, - these appointments of a
rich man's stable impressed Wellington very
much, and he wondered that so much luxury
should be wasted on mere horses. The room
assigned to him, in the second story of the barn,
was a finer apartment than he had ever slept in;
and the salary attached to the situation was
greater than the combined monthly earnings of
himself and aunt Milly in their Southern home.
Surely, he thought, his lines had fallen in pleasant
places.

Under the stimulus of new surroundings
Wellington applied himself diligently to work,
and, with the occasional advice of Mr. Peterson,
soon mastered the details of his employment. He
found the female servants, with whom he took
his meals, very amiable ladies. The cook, Mrs.
Katie Flannigan, was a widow. Her husband, a
sailor, had been lost at sea.
She was a woman of many words, and when she
was not lamenting the late Flannigan's
loss, - according to her story he had been a
model of all the virtues, - she would turn the
batteries of her tongue against the former
coachman. This gentleman, as Wellington
gathered from frequent remarks dropped by Mrs.
Flannigan, had paid her attentions clearly
susceptible of a serious construction. These
attentions had not borne their legitimate fruit, and
she was still a widow unconsoled, - hence Mrs.
Flannigan's tears. The housemaid was a plump,
good-natured German girl, with a pronounced
German accent. The presence on washdays of a
Bohemian laundress, of recent importation,
added another to the variety of ways in which the
English tongue was mutilated in Mr. Todd's
kitchen. Association with the white women drew
out all the native gallantry of the mulatto, and
Wellington developed quite a helpful turn. His
politeness, his willingness to lend a hand in
kitchen or laundry, and the fact that he was the
only male servant on the place, combined to
make him a prime favorite in the servants'
quarters.

It was the general opinion among Wellington's
acquaintances that he was a single man.
He had come to the city alone, had never been
heard to speak of a wife, and to personal
questions bearing upon the subject of matrimony
had always returned evasive answers. Though he
had never questioned the correctness of the
lawyer's opinion in regard to his slave marriage,
his conscience had never been entirely at ease
since his departure from the South, and any
positive denial of his married condition would
have stuck in his throat. The inference naturally
drawn from his reticence in regard to the past,
coupled with his expressed intention of settling
permanently in Groveland, was that he belonged
in the ranks of the unmarried, and was therefore
legitimate game for any widow or old maid who
could bring him down. As such game is bagged
easiest at short range, he received numerous
invitations to tea-parties, where he feasted on
unlimited chicken and pound cake. He used to
compare these viands with the plain fare often
served by aunt Milly, and the result of the
comparison was another item to the credit of the
North upon his mental ledger. Several of the
colored ladies who smiled upon him were blessed
with good looks, and uncle Wellington, naturally
of a susceptible
temperament, as people of lively imagination
are apt to be, would probably have fallen a victim
to the charms of some woman of his own race,
had it not been for a strong counter-attraction in
the person of Mrs. Flannigan. The attentions of
the lately discharged coachman had lighted anew
the smouldering fires of her widowed heart, and
awakened longings which still remained
unsatisfied. She was thirty-five years old, and felt
the need of some one else to love. She was not a
woman of lofty ideals; with her a man was a
man -

“For a' that an' a' that;”

and, aside from the accident of color, uncle
Wellington was as personable a man as any of
her acquaintance. Some people might have
objected to his complexion; but then, Mrs.
Flannigan argued, he was at least half white; and,
this being the case, there was no good reason
why he should be regarded as black.

Uncle Wellington was not slow to perceive
Mrs. Flannigan's charms of person, and
appreciated to the full the skill that prepared the
choice tidbits reserved for his plate at dinner.
The prospect of securing a white
wife had been one of the principal inducements
offered by a life at the North; but the awe of
white people in which he had been reared was
still too strong to permit his taking any active
steps toward the object of his secret desire, had
not the lady herself come to his assistance with a
little of the native coquetry of her race.

“Ah, Misther Braboy,” she said one evening
when they sat at the supper table alone, - it was
the second girl's afternoon off, and she had not
come home to supper, - “it must be an awful
lonesome life ye've been afther l'adin', as a single
man, wid no one to cook fer ye, or look afther
ye.”

“An' even if ye mane it, Misther Braboy, the
time is liable to come when things 'll be
different; for service is uncertain, Misther
Braboy. An' then you'll wish you had some nice,
clean woman, 'at knowed how to cook an' wash
an' iron, ter look afther ye, an' make yer life
comfortable.”

Uncle Wellington sighed, and looked at her
languishingly.

“It 'u'd all be well ernuff, Mis' Flannigan, ef I
had n' met you; but I don' know whar I's ter fin'
a colored lady w'at 'll begin ter suit me after
habbin' libbed in de same house wid you.”

“Colored lady, indade! Why, Misther
Braboy, ye don't nade ter demane yerself by
marryin' a colored lady - not but they're as good
as anybody else, so long as they behave
themselves. There 's many a white woman 'u'd be
glad ter git as fine a lookin' man as ye are.”

“Now you 're flattrin' me, Mis' Flannigan,” said Wellington. But he felt a
sudden and substantial increase in courage when
she had spoken, and it was with astonishing ease
that he found himself saying: -

Mrs. Flannigan affected much surprise and
embarrassment at this bold declaration.

“Oh, Misther Braboy,” she said, covering him
with a coy glance, “an' it 's rale 'shamed I am to
hev b'en talkin' ter ye ez I hev. It looks as though
I'd b'en doin' the coortin'. I did n't drame that
I'd b'en able ter draw yer affections to mesilf.”

“I's loved you ever sence I fell in yo' lap on
de street car de fus' day I wuz in Groveland,”
he said, as he moved his chair up closer to hers.

One evening in the following week they went
out after supper to the residence of Rev. Cæsar
Williams, pastor of the colored Baptist church,
and, after the usual preliminaries, were
pronounced man and wife.

III

According to all his preconceived notions, this
marriage ought to have been the acme of uncle
Wellington's felicity. But he soon found that it
was not without its drawbacks. On the following
morning Mr. Todd was informed of the marriage.
He had no special objection to it, or interest in it,
except that he was opposed on principle to
having husband and wife in his employment at the
same time. As a consequence, Mrs. Braboy,
whose place could be more easily filled than that
of her husband, received notice that her services
would not be required after the end of the month.
Her husband was retained in his place as
coachman.

Upon the loss of her situation Mrs. Braboy
decided to exercise the married woman's
prerogative of letting her husband support her.
She rented the upper floor of a small house in an
Irish neighborhood. The newly wedded pair
furnished their rooms on the installment plan and
began housekeeping.

There was one little circumstance, however,
that interfered slightly with their enjoyment of
that perfect freedom from care which ought
to characterize a honeymoon. The people who
owned the house and occupied the lower floor
had rented the upper part to Mrs. Braboy in
person, it never occurring to them that her
husband could be other than a white man. When
it became known that he was colored, the
landlord, Mr. Dennis O'Flaherty, felt that he had
been imposed upon, and, at the end of the first
month, served notice upon his tenants to leave
the premises. When Mrs. Braboy, with
characteristic impetuosity, inquired the meaning
of this proceeding, she was informed by Mr.
O'Flaherty that he did not care to live in the same
house “wid naygurs.” Mrs. Braboy resented the
epithet with more warmth than dignity, and for a
brief space of time the air was green with choice
specimens of brogue, the altercation barely
ceasing before it had reached the point of blows.

It was quite clear that the Braboys could not
longer live comfortably in Mr. O'Flaherty's
house, and they soon vacated the premises, first
letting the rent get a couple of weeks in arrears
as a punishment to the too fastidious landlord.
They moved to a small house on Hackman
Street, a favorite locality with colored people.

For a while, affairs ran smoothly in the new
home. The colored people seemed, at first, well
enough disposed toward Mrs. Braboy, and she
made quite a large acquaintance among them. It
was difficult, however, for Mrs. Braboy to divest
herself of the consciousness that she was white,
and therefore superior to her neighbors.
Occasional words and acts by which she
manifested this feeling were noticed and resented
by her keen-eyed and sensitive colored
neighbors. The result was a slight coolness
between them. That her few white neighbors did
not visit her, she naturally and no doubt correctly
imputed to disapproval of her matrimonial
relations.

Under these circumstances, Mrs. Braboy was
left a good deal to her own company. Owing to
lack of opportunity in early life, she was not a
woman of many resources, either mental or
moral. It is therefore not strange that, in order to
relieve her loneliness, she should occasionally
have recourse to a glass of beer, and, as the
habit grew upon her, to still stronger stimulants.
Uncle Wellington himself was no teetotaler, and
did not interpose any objection so long as she
kept her potations within reasonable limits, and
was apparently none the worse for them; indeed,
he sometimes joined her in a glass. On one of
these occasions he drank a little too much, and,
while driving the ladies of Mr. Todd's family to
the opera, ran against a lamp-post and
overturned the carriage, to the serious
discomposure of the ladies' nerves and at the
cost of his situation.

A coachman discharged under such
circumstances is not in the best position for
procuring employment at his calling, and uncle
Wellington, under the pressure of need, was
obliged to seek some other means of livelihood.
At the suggestion of his friend Mr. Johnson, he
bought a whitewash brush, a peck of lime, a
couple of pails, and a handcart, and began work
as a whitewasher. His first efforts were very
crude, and for a while he lost a customer in every
person he worked for. He nevertheless managed
to pick up a living during the spring and summer
months, and to support his wife and himself in
comparative comfort.

The approach of winter put an end to the
whitewashing season, and left uncle Wellington
dependent for support upon occasional jobs of
unskilled labor. The income derived from
these was very uncertain, and Mrs. Braboy was
at length driven, by stress of circumstances, to
the washtub, that last refuge of honest,
able-bodied poverty, in all countries where the
use of clothing is conventional.

The last state of uncle Wellington was now
worse than the first. Under the soft firmness of
aunt Milly's rule, he had not been required to do
a great deal of work, prompt and cheerful
obedience being chiefly what was expected of
him. But matters were very different here. He
had not only to bring in the coal and water, but
to rub the clothes and turn the wringer, and to
humiliate himself before the public by emptying
the tubs and hanging out the wash in full view of
the neighbors; and he had to deliver the clothes
when laundered.

At times Wellington found himself wondering if
his second marriage had been a wise one. Other
circumstances combined to change in some
degree his once rose-colored conception of life
at the North. He had believed that all men were
equal in this favored locality, but he discovered
more degrees of inequality than he had ever
perceived at the South. A colored man might be
as good as a white
man in theory, but neither of them was of any
special consequence without money, or talent, or
position. Uncle Wellington found a great many
privileges open to him at the North, but he had
not been educated to the point where he could
appreciate them or take advantage of them; and
the enjoyment of many of them was expensive,
and, for that reason alone, as far beyond his
reach as they had ever been. When he once
began to admit even the possibility of a mistake
on his part, these considerations presented
themselves to his mind with increasing force. On
occasions when Mrs. Braboy would require of
him some unusual physical exertion, or when too
frequent applications to the bottle had loosened
her tongue, uncle Wellington's mind would revert,
with a remorseful twinge of conscience, to the
dolce far niente of his Southern home; a film
would come over his eyes and brain, and, instead
of the red-faced Irishwoman opposite him, he
could see the black but comely disk of aunt
Milly's countenance bending over the washtub;
the elegant brogue of Mrs. Braboy would
deliquesce into the soft dialect of North
Carolina; and he would only be aroused from
this blissful reverie by a wet
shirt or a handful of suds thrown into his face,
with which gentle reminder his wife would recall
his attention to the duties of the moment.

There came a time, one day in spring, when
there was no longer any question about it: uncle
Wellington was desperately homesick.

Liberty, equality, privileges, - all were but as
dust in the balance when weighed against his
longing for old scenes and faces. It was the
natural reaction in the mind of a middle-aged man
who had tried to force the current of a sluggish
existence into a new and radically different
channel. An active, industrious man, making the
change in early life, while there was time to spare
for the waste of adaptation, might have found in
the new place more favorable conditions than in
the old. In Wellington age and temperament
combined to prevent the success of the
experiment; the spirit of enterprise and ambition
into which he had been temporarily galvanized
could no longer prevail against the inertia of old
habits of life and thought.

One day when he had been sent to deliver
clothes he performed his errand quickly, and
boarding a passing street car, paid one of his
very few five-cent pieces to ride down to the
office of the Hon. Mr. Brown, the colored
lawyer whom he had visited when he first came
to the city, and who was well known to him by
sight and reputation.

“Well, Mr. Braboy, it's what you might have
expected when you turned your back on your
own people and married a white woman. You
weren't content with being a slave to the white
folks once, but you must
try it again. Some people never know when
they've got enough. I don't see that there's
any help for you; unless,” he added suggestively,
“you had a good deal of money.”

“That was once the law, though it has always
been a dead letter in Groveland. In fact, it was
the law when you got married, and until I
introduced a bill in the legislature last fall to repeal
it. But even that law didn't hit cases like yours. It
was unlawful to make such a marriage, but it was
a good marriage when once made.”

“I don' jes' git dat th'oo my head,” said
Wellington, scratching that member as though to
make a hole for the idea to enter.

“It's quite plain, Mr. Braboy. It's unlawful to
kill a man, but when he's killed he's just as dead
as though the law permitted it. I'm afraid you
have n't much of a case, but if you'll go to work
and get twenty-five dollars together, I'll see
what I can do for you. We may be able to pull a
case through on the ground of extreme cruelty. I
might even start the case if you brought in ten
dollars.”

Wellington went away sorrowfully. The laws
of Ohio were very little more satisfactory than
those of North Carolina. And as for the ten
dollars, - the lawyer might as well have told him
to bring in the moon, or a deed for the Public
Square. He felt very, very low as he hurried back
home to supper, which he would have to go
without if he were not on hand at the usual
supper-time.

But just when his spirits were lowest, and his
outlook for the future most hopeless, a measure
of relief was at hand. He noticed, when he
reached home, that Mrs. Braboy was a little
preoccupied, and did not abuse him as vigorously
as he expected after so long an absence. He also
perceived the smell of strange tobacco in the
house, of a better grade than he could afford to
use. He thought perhaps some one had come in
to see about the washing; but he was too glad of
a respite from Mrs. Braboy's rhetoric to imperil it
by indiscreet questions.

Uncle Wellington was overjoyed at this
change of front on the part of Mrs. Braboy; if she
would make it permanent he did not see why
they might not live together very comfortably.

The day passed pleasantly down on the
breakwater. The weather was agreeable, and the
fish bit freely. Towards evening Wellington
started home with a bunch of fish that no angler
need have been ashamed of. He looked forward
to a good warm supper; for even if something
should have happened during the day to alter his
wife's mood for the worse, any ordinary variation
would be more than balanced by the substantial
addition of food to their larder. His mouth
watered at the thought of the finny beauties
sputtering in the frying-pan.

He noted, as he approached the house, that
there was no smoke coming from the chimney.
This only disturbed him in connection with the
matter of supper. When he entered the
gate he observed further that the windowshades
had been taken down.

“'Spec' de ole 'oman's been house-cleanin',”
he said to himself. “I wonder she did n' make me
stay an' he'p 'er.”

He went round to the rear of the house and
tried the kitchen door. It was locked. This was
somewhat of a surprise, and disturbed still further
his expectations in regard to supper. When he
had found the key and opened the door, the
gravity of his next discovery drove away for the
time being all thoughts of eating.

The kitchen was empty. Stove, table, chairs,
wash-tubs, pots and pans, had vanished as if into
thin air.

“Fo' de Lawd's sake!” he murmured in
open-mouthed astonishment.

He passed into the other room, - they had
only two, - which had served as bedroom and
sitting-room. It was as bare as the first, except
that in the middle of the floor were piled uncle
Wellington's clothes. It was not a large pile, and
on the top of it lay a folded piece of yellow
wrapping-paper.

Wellington stood for a moment as if petrified.
Then he rubbed his eyes and looked around him.

“W'at do dis mean?” he said. “Is I
er-dreamin', er does I see w'at I 'pears ter see?”
He glanced down at the bunch of fish which he
still held. “Heah's de fish; heah's de house; heah
I is; but whar 's de ole 'omen, an' whar 's de
fu'niture? I can't figure out w'at dis yer all means.”

He picked up the piece of paper and unfolded
it. It was written on one side. Here was the
obvious solution of the mystery, - that is, it
would have been obvious if he could have read it;
but he could not, and so his fancy continued to
play upon the subject. Perhaps the house had
been robbed, or the furniture taken back by the
seller, for it had not been entirely paid for.

Finally he went across the street and called to
a boy in a neighbor's yard.

“Does you read writin', Johnnie?”

“Yes, sir, I'm in the seventh grade.”

“Read dis yer paper fuh me.”

The youngster took the note, and with much
labor read the following: -

“MR. BRABOY:

“In lavin' ye so suddint I have ter say that my
first husban' has turned up unixpected,

PERHAPS THE HOUSE HAD BEEN ROBBED

having been saved onbeknownst ter me
from a wathry grave an' all the money wasted I
spint fer masses fer ter rist his sole an' I wish I
had it back I feel it my dooty ter go an' live wid
'im again. I take the furnacher because I bought it
yer close is yors I leave them and wishin' yer the
best of luck I remane oncet yer wife but now
agin

“MRS. KATIE FLANNIGAN.
“N.B. I'm lavin town terday so it won't be no
use lookin' fer me.”

On inquiry uncle Wellington learned from the
boy that shortly after his departure in the morning
a white man had appeared on the scene,
followed a little later by a moving-van, into which
the furniture had been loaded and carried away.
Mrs. Braboy, clad in her best clothes, had
locked the door, and gone away with the
strange white man.

The news was soon noised about the street.
Wellington swapped his fish for supper and a
bed at a neighbor's, and during the evening
learned from several sources that the strange
white man had been at his house the afternoon of
the day before. His neighbors intimated that they
thought Mrs. Braboy's
departure a good riddance of bad rubbish, and
Wellington did not dispute the proposition.

Thus ended the second chapter of
Wellington's matrimonial experiences. His wife's
departure had been the one thing needful to
convince him, beyond a doubt, that he had been
a great fool. Remorse and homesickness forced
him to the further conclusion that he had been
knave as well as fool, and had treated aunt Milly
shamefully. He was not altogether a bad old man,
though very weak and erring, and his better
nature now gained the ascendancy. Of course his
disappointment had a great deal to do with his
remorse; most people do not perceive the
hideousness of sin until they begin to reap its
consequences. Instead of the beautiful Northern
life he had dreamed of, he found himself
stranded, penniless, in a strange land, among
people whose sympathy he had forfeited, with no
one to lean upon, and no refuge from the storms
of life. His outlook was very dark, and there
sprang up within him a wild longing to get back
to North Carolina, - back to the little
whitewashed cabin, shaded with china and
mulberry trees; back to the wood-pile
and the garden; back to the old cronies with
whom he had swapped lies and tobacco for so
many years. He longed to kiss the rod of aunt
Milly's domination. He had purchased his liberty
at too great a price.

The next day he disappeared from Groveland.
He had announced his departure only to Mr.
Johnson, who sent his love to his relations in
Patesville.

It would be painful to record in detail the
return journey of uncle Wellington - Mr. Braboy
no longer - to his native town; how many weary
miles he walked; how many times he risked his
life on railroad trucks and between freight cars;
how he depended for sustenance on the grudging
hand of backdoor charity. Nor would it be
profitable or delicate to mention any slight
deviations from the path of rectitude, as judged
by conventional standards, to which he may
occasionally have been driven by a too insistent
hunger; or to refer in the remotest degree to a
compulsory sojourn of thirty days in a city where
he had no references, and could show no visible
means of support. True charity will let these
purely personal matters remain locked in the
bosom of him who suffered them.

IV

Just fifteen months after the date when uncle
Wellington had left North Carolina, a
weather-beaten figure entered the town of Patesville
after nightfall, following the railroad track from the
north. Few would have recognized in the hungry-looking
old brown tramp, clad in dusty rags and
limping along with bare feet, the trim-looking
middle-aged mulatto who so few months before
had taken the train from Patesville for the distant
North; so, if he had but known it, there was no
necessity for him to avoid the main streets and
sneak around by unfrequented paths to reach the
old place on the other side of the town. He
encountered nobody that he knew, and soon the
familiar shape of the little cabin rose before him.
It stood distinctly outlined against the sky, and
the light streaming from the half-opened shutters
showed it to be occupied. As he drew nearer,
every familiar detail of the place appealed to his
memory and to his affections, and his heart went
out to the old home and the old wife. As he came
nearer still, the odor of fried chicken floated out
upon the air and set his mouth to watering,
and awakened unspeakable longings in his
half-starved stomach.

At this moment, however, a fearful thought
struck him; suppose the old woman had taken
legal advice and married again during his
absence? Turn about would have been only fair
play. He opened the gate softly, and with his
heart in his mouth approached the window on
tiptoe and looked in.

A cheerful fire was blazing on the hearth, in
front of which sat the familiar form of aunt
Milly - and another, at the sight of whom uncle
Wellington's heart sank within him. He knew the
other person very well; he had sat there more
than once before uncle Wellington went away. It
was the minister of the church to which his wife
belonged. The preacher's former visits, however,
had signified nothing more than pastoral courtesy,
or appreciation of good eating. His presence now
was of serious portent; for Wellington recalled,
with acute alarm, that the elder's wife had died
only a few weeks before his own departure for
the North. What was the occasion of his
presence this evening? Was it merely a pastoral
call? or was he courting? or had aunt Milly taken
legal advice and married the elder?

Wellington remembered a crack in the wall, at
the back of the house, through which he could
see and hear, and quietly stationed himself there.

“Dat chicken smells mighty good, Sis' Milly,”
the elder was saying; “I can't fer de life er me see
why dat low-down husban' er yo'n could ever
run away f'm a cook like you. It's one er de
beatenis' things I ever heared. How he could lib
wid you an' not 'preciate you I can't understan',
no indeed I can't.”

“Yas, elder,” responded aunt Milly, “I wa'n't
used right. An' den w'en I heared 'bout his goin'
ter de lawyer ter fin' out 'bout a defoce, an' w'en
I heared w'at de lawyer said 'bout my not bein'
his wife 'less he
wanted me, it made me so mad, I made up my
min' dat ef he ever put his foot on my do'sill ag'in,
I'd shet de do' in his face an' tell 'im ter go back
whar he come f'm.”

To Wellington, on the outside, the cabin had
never seemed so comfortable, aunt Milly never so
desirable, chicken never so appetizing, as at this
moment when they seemed slipping away from
his grasp forever.

“Yo' feelin's does you credit, Sis' Milly,” said
the elder, taking her hand, which for a moment
she did not withdraw. “An' de way fer you ter
close yo' do' tightes' ag'inst 'im is ter take me in
his place. He ain' got no claim on you no mo'. He
tuk his ch'ice 'cordin' ter w'at de lawyer tol' 'im,
an' 'termine' dat he wa'n't yo' husban'. Ef he
wa'n't yo' husban', he had no right ter take yo'
money, an' ef he comes back here ag'in you kin
hab 'im tuck up an' sent ter de penitenchy fer
stealin' it.”

Uncle Wellington's knees, already weak from
fasting, trembled violently beneath him. The
worst that he had feared was now likely to
happen. His only hope of safety lay in flight, and
yet the scene within so fascinated him that he
could not move a step.

“It 'u'd serve him right,” exclaimed aunt Milly
indignantly, “ef he wuz sent ter de penitenchy fer
life! Dey ain't nuthin' too mean ter be done ter
'im. What did I ever do dat he should use me like
he did?”

The recital of her wrongs had wrought upon
aunt Milly's feelings so that her voice broke, and
she wiped her eyes with her apron.

The elder looked serenely confident, and
moved his chair nearer hers in order the better to
play the rôle of comforter. Wellington, on the
outside, felt so mean that the darkness of the
night was scarcely sufficient to hide him; it would
be no more than right if the earth were to open
and swallow him up.

With a bound, uncle Wellington was away
from the crack in the wall. As he ran round the
house he passed the wood-pile and snatched
up an armful of pieces. A moment later he threw
open the door.

“Ole 'oman,” he exclaimed, “here's dat wood
you tol' me ter fetch in! Why, elder,” he said to
the preacher, who had started from his seat with
surprise, “w'at's yo' hurry? Won't you stay an'
hab some supper wid us?”

THE BOUQUET

MARY MYROVER'S friends were
somewhat surprised when she began to teach a
colored school. Miss Myrover's friends are
mentioned here, because nowhere more than in a
Southern town is public opinion a force which
cannot be lightly contravened. Public opinion,
however, did not oppose Miss Myrover's
teaching colored children; in fact, all the colored
public schools in town - and there were
several - were taught by white teachers, and had
been so taught since the State had undertaken to
provide free public instruction for all children
within its boundaries. Previous to that time, there
had been a Freedman's Bureau school and a
Presbyterian missionary school, but these had
been withdrawn when the need for them became
less pressing. The colored people of the town
had been for some time agitating their right to
teach their own schools, but as yet the claim had
not been conceded.

The reason Miss Myrover's course created
some surprise was not, therefore, the fact that a
Southern white woman should teach a colored
school; it lay in the fact that up to this time no
woman of just her quality had taken up such
work. Most of the teachers of colored schools
were not of those who had constituted the
aristocracy of the old régime; they might be said
rather to represent the new order of things, in
which labor was in time to become honorable,
and men were, after a somewhat longer time, to
depend, for their place in society, upon
themselves rather than upon their ancestors.
Mary Myrover belonged to one of the proudest
of the old families. Her ancestors had been
people of distinction in Virginia before a collateral
branch of the main stock had settled in North
Carolina. Before the war, they had been able to
live up to their pedigree; but the war brought sad
changes. Miss Myrover's father - the Colonel
Myrover who led a gallant but desperate charge
at Vicksburg - had fallen on the battlefield, and
his tomb in the white cemetery was a shrine for
the family. On the Confederate Memorial Day,
no other grave was so profusely decorated with
flowers, and,
in the oration pronounced, the name of Colonel
Myrover was always used to illustrate the highest
type of patriotic devotion and self-sacrifice. Miss
Myrover's brother, too, had fallen in the conflict;
but his bones lay in some unknown trench, with
those of a thousand others who had fallen on the
same field. Ay, more, her lover, who had hoped
to come home in the full tide of victory and claim
his bride as a reward for gallantry, had shared the
fate of her father and brother. When the war was
over, the remnant of the family found itself
involved in the common ruin, - more deeply
involved, indeed, than some others; for Colonel
Myrover had believed in the ultimate triumph of
his cause, and had invested most of his wealth in
Confederate bonds, which were now only so
much waste paper.

There had been a little left. Mrs. Myrover was
thrifty, and had laid by a few hundred dollars,
which she kept in the house to meet unforeseen
contingencies. There remained, too, their home,
with an ample garden and a well-stocked
orchard, besides a considerable tract of country
land, partly cleared, but productive of very little
revenue.

With their shrunken resources, Miss Myrover
and her mother were able to hold up their heads
without embarrassment for some years after the
close of the war. But when things were adjusted
to the changed conditions, and the stream of life
began to flow more vigorously in the new
channels, they saw themselves in danger of
dropping behind, unless in some way they could
add to their meagre income. Miss Myrover
looked over the field of employment, never very
wide for women in the South, and found it
occupied. The only available position she could
be supposed prepared to fill, and which she
could take without distinct loss of caste, was that
of a teacher, and there was no vacancy except in
one of the colored schools. Even teaching was a
doubtful experiment; it was not what she would
have preferred, but it was the best that could be
done.

“I don't like it, Mary,” said her mother. “It's a
long step from owning such people to teaching
them. What do they need with education? It will
only make them unfit for work.”

“They're free now, mother, and perhaps they'll
work better if they're taught something.
Besides, it 's only a business arrangement,
and doesn't involve any closer contact than we
have with our servants.”

“Well, I should say not!” sniffed the old lady.
“Not one of them will ever dare to presume on
your position to take any liberties with us. I'll see to that.”

Miss Myrover began her work as a teacher in
the autumn, at the opening of the school year. It
was a novel experience at first. Though there had
always been negro servants in the house, and
though on the streets colored people were more
numerous than those of her own race, and though
she was so familiar with their dialect that she
might almost be said to speak it, barring certain
characteristic grammatical inaccuracies, she had
never been brought in personal contact with so
many of them at once as when she confronted the
fifty or sixty faces - of colors ranging from a
white almost as clear as her own to the darkest
livery of the sun - which were gathered in the
schoolroom on the morning when she began her
duties. Some of the inherited prejudice of her
caste, too, made itself felt, though she tried to
repress any outward sign of it; and she could
perceive that the children
were not altogether responsive; they,
likewise, were not entirely free from antagonism.
The work was unfamiliar to her. She was not
physically very strong, and at the close of the first
day went home with a splitting headache. If she
could have resigned then and there without
causing comment or annoyance to others, she
would have felt it a privilege to do so. But a
night's rest banished her headache and improved
her spirits, and the next morning she went to her
work with renewed vigor, fortified by the
experience of the first day.

Miss Myrover's second day was more
satisfactory. She had some natural talent for
organization, though hitherto unaware of it, and in
the course of the day she got her classes formed
and lessons under way. In a week or two she
began to classify her pupils in her own mind, as
bright or stupid, mischievous or well behaved,
lazy or industrious, as the case might be, and to
regulate her discipline accordingly. That she had
come of a long line of ancestors who had
exercised authority and mastership was perhaps
not without its effect upon her character, and
enabled her more readily to maintain good
order in the school. When she was fairly broken
in, she found the work rather to her liking, and
derived much pleasure from such success as she
achieved as a teacher.

It was natural that she should be more
attracted to some of her pupils than to others.
Perhaps her favorite - or, rather, the one she
liked best, for she was too fair and just for
conscious favoritism - was Sophy Tucker. Just
the ground for the teacher's liking for Sophy
might not at first be apparent. The girl was far
from the whitest of Miss Myrover's pupils; in fact,
she was one of the darker ones. She was not the
brightest in intellect, though she always tried to
learn her lessons. She was not the best dressed,
for her mother was a poor widow, who went out
washing and scrubbing for a living. Perhaps the
real tie between them was Sophy's intense
devotion to the teacher. It had manifested itself
almost from the first day of the school, in the rapt
look of admiration Miss Myrover always saw on
the little black face turned toward her. In it there
was nothing of envy, nothing of regret; nothing
but worship for the beautiful white lady - she was
not especially handsome, but to Sophy her beauty was
almost divine - who had come to teach her. If
Miss Myrover dropped a book, Sophy was the
first to spring and pick it up; if she wished a chair
moved, Sophy seemed to anticipate her wish;
and so of all the numberless little services that
can be rendered in a schoolroom.

Miss Myrover was fond of flowers, and liked
to have them about her. The children soon
learned of this taste of hers, and kept the vases
on her desk filled with blossoms during their
season. Sophy was perhaps the most active in
providing them. If she could not get garden
flowers, she would make excursions to the
woods in the early morning, and bring in great
dew-laden bunches of bay, or jasmine, or some
other fragrant forest flower which she knew the
teacher loved.

“When I die, Sophy,” Miss Myrover said to
the child one day, “I want to be covered with
roses. And when they bury me, I'm sure I shall
rest better if my grave is banked with flowers,
and roses are planted at my head and at my
feet.”

Miss Myrover was at first amused at Sophy's
devotion; but when she grew more accustomed
to it, she found it rather to her liking.
It had a sort of flavor of the old régime, and she
felt, when she bestowed her kindly notice upon
her little black attendant, some of the feudal
condescension of the mistress toward the slave.
She was kind to Sophy, and permitted her to
play the rôle she had assumed, which caused
sometimes a little jealousy among the other girls.
Once she gave Sophy a yellow ribbon which she
took from her own hair. The child carried it
home, and cherished it as a priceless treasure, to
be worn only on the greatest occasions.

Sophy had a rival in her attachment to the
teacher, but the rivalry was altogether friendly.
Miss Myrover had a little dog, a white spaniel,
answering to the name of Prince. Prince was a
dog of high degree, and would have very little to
do with the children of the school; he made an
exception, however, in the case of Sophy, whose
devotion for his mistress he seemed to
comprehend. He was a clever dog, and could
fetch and carry, sit up on his haunches, extend his
paw to shake hands, and possessed several other
canine accomplishments. He was very fond of his
mistress, and always, unless shut up at home,
accompanied her to school, where he spent most of
his time lying under the teacher's desk or, in cold
weather, by the stove, except when he would go
out now and then and chase an imaginary rabbit
round the yard, presumably for exercise.

At school Sophy and Prince vied with each
other in their attentions to Miss Myrover. But
when school was over, Prince went away with
her, and Sophy stayed behind; for Miss Myrover
was white and Sophy was black, which they both
understood perfectly well. Miss Myrover taught
the colored children, but she could not be seen
with them in public. If they occasionally met her
on the street, they did not expect her to speak to
them, unless she happened to be alone and no
other white person was in sight. If any of the
children felt slighted, she was not aware of it, for
she intended no slight; she had not been brought
up to speak to negroes on the street, and she
could not act differently from other people. And
though she was a woman of sentiment and
capable of deep feeling, her training had been such
that she hardly expected to find in those of darker
hue than herself the same susceptibility - varying
in degree, perhaps, but yet the same in kind -
that gave to her own life the alternations of
feeling that made it most worth living.

Once Miss Myrover wished to carry home a
parcel of books. She had the bundle in her hand
when Sophy came up.

Sophy followed the teacher at a respectful
distance. When they reached Miss Myrover's
home, Sophy carried the bundle to the doorstep,
where Miss Myrover took it and thanked her.

Mrs. Myrover came out on the piazza as
Sophy was moving away. She said, in the child's
hearing, and perhaps with the intention that she
should hear: “Mary, I wish you wouldn't let
those little darkeys follow you to the house. I
don't want them in the yard. I should think you 'd
have enough of them all day.”

“Very well, mother,” replied her daughter. “I
won't bring any more of them. The child was only
doing me a favor.”

Mrs. Myrover was an invalid, and opposition
or irritation of any kind brought on nervous
paroxysms that made her miserable, and made
life a burden to the rest of the household, so that
Mary seldom crossed her whims. She did not
bring Sophy to the house again, nor did Sophy
again offer her services as porter.

One day in spring Sophy brought her teacher
a bouquet of yellow roses.

“Dey come off'n my own bush, Miss Ma'y,”
she said proudly, “an' I did n' let nobody e'se
pull 'em, but saved 'em all fer you, 'cause I know
you likes roses so much. I'm gwine bring 'em all
ter you as long as dey las'.”

“Thank you, Sophy,” said the teacher; “you
are a very good girl.”

For another year Mary Myrover taught the
colored school, and did excellent service. The
children made rapid progress under her tuition,
and learned to love her well; for they saw and
appreciated, as well as children could, her fidelity
to a trust that she might have slighted, as some
others did, without much fear of criticism.
Toward the end of her second year she sickened,
and after a brief illness died.

Old Mrs. Myrover was inconsolable. She
ascribed her daughter's death to her labors as
teacher of negro children. Just how the color of
the pupils had produced the fatal effects she did
not stop to explain. But she was too old, and had
suffered too deeply from the war, in body and
mind and estate, ever to reconcile herself to the
changed order of things following the return of
peace; and, with an unsound yet perfectly
explainable logic, she visited some of her
displeasure upon those who had profited most,
though passively, by her losses.

“I always feared something would happen to
Mary,” she said. “It seemed unnatural for her to
be wearing herself out teaching little negroes who
ought to have been working for her. But the
world has hardly been a fit place to live in since
the war, and when I follow her, as I must before
long, I shall not be sorry to go.”

She gave strict orders that no colored people
should be admitted to the house. Some of her
friends heard of this, and remonstrated. They
knew the teacher was loved by the pupils, and
felt that sincere respect from the humble would
be a worthy tribute to the proudest. But Mrs.
Myrover was obdurate.

“They had my daughter when she was alive,”
she said, “and they've killed her. But she 's mine
now, and I won't have them come near her. I
don't want one of them at the funeral or
anywhere around.”

For a month before Miss Myrover's death
Sophy had been watching her rosebush - the one
that bore the yellow roses - or the first buds of
spring, and, when these appeared, had awaited
impatiently their gradual unfolding. But not until
her teacher's death had they become full-blown
roses. When Miss Myrover died, Sophy
determined to pluck the roses and lay them on
her coffin. Perhaps, she thought, they might even
put them in her hand or on her breast. For Sophy
remembered Miss Myrover's thanks and praise
when she had brought her the yellow roses the
spring before.

On the morning of the day set for the funeral,
Sophy washed her face until it shone, combed
and brushed her hair with painful
conscientiousness, put on her best frock, plucked
her yellow roses, and, tying them with the
treasured ribbon her teacher had given her, set
out for Miss Myrover's home.

She went round to the side gate - the
house stood on a corner - and stole up the path
to the kitchen. A colored woman, whom she did
not know, came to the door.

A moment after she had gone, there was a
step in the hall, and old Mrs. Myrover came into
the kitchen.

“Dinah!” she said in a peevish tone; “Dinah! ”

Receiving no answer, Mrs. Myrover peered
around the kitchen, and caught sight of Sophy.

“What are you doing here?” she demanded.

“I - I 'm-m waitin' ter see de cook, ma'am,”
stammered Sophy.

“The cook is n't here now. I don't know
where she is. Besides, my daughter is to be
buried to-day, and I won't have any one visiting
the servants until the funeral is over. Come back
some other day, or see the cook at her own
home in the evening.”

She stood waiting for the child to go, and
under the keen glance of her eyes Sophy, feeling
as though she had been caught in some
disgraceful act, hurried down the walk and out of
the gate, with her bouquet in her hand.

“Dinah,” said Mrs. Myrover, when the cook
came back,“I don't want any strange people
admitted here to-day. The house will be full of
our friends, and we have no room for others.”

“Yas 'm,” said the cook. She understood
perfectly what her mistress meant; and what the
cook thought about her mistress was a matter of
no consequence.

The funeral services were held at St. Paul's
Episcopal Church, where the Myrovers had
always worshiped. Quite a number of Miss
Myrover's pupils went to the church to attend the
services. The building was not a large one. There
was a small gallery at the rear, to which
colored people were admitted, if they chose to
come, at ordinary services; and those who
wished to be present at the funeral supposed that
the usual custom would prevail. They were
therefore surprised, when they went to the side
entrance, by which colored people gained access
to the gallery stairs, to be met by an usher who
barred their passage.

“I 'm sorry,” he said, “but I have had orders to
admit no one until the friends of the family have
all been seated. If you wish to wait until the white
people have all gone in, and there 's any room
left, you may be able to get into the back part of
the gallery. Of course I can't tell yet whether
there 'll be any room or not.”

Now the statement of the usher was a very
reasonable one; but, strange to say, none of the
colored people chose to remain except Sophy.
She still hoped to use her floral offering for its
destined end, in some way, though she did not
know just how. She waited in the yard until the
church was filled with white people, and a
number who could not gain admittance were
standing about the doors. Then she went round
to the side of the church, and, depositing her
bouquet carefully
on an old mossy gravestone, climbed up on
the projecting sill of a window near the chancel.
The window was of stained glass, of somewhat
ancient make. The church was old, had indeed
been built in colonial times, and the stained glass
had been brought from England. The design of
the window showed Jesus blessing little children.
Time had dealt gently with the window, but just
at the feet of the figure of Jesus a small triangular
piece of glass had been broken out. To this
aperture Sophy applied her eyes, and through it
saw and heard what she could of the services
within.

Before the chancel, on trestles draped in
black, stood the sombre casket in which lay all
that was mortal of her dear teacher. The top of
the casket was covered with flowers; and lying
stretched out underneath it she saw Miss
Myrover's little white dog, Prince. He had
followed the body to the church, and, slipping in
unnoticed among the mourners, had taken his
place, from which no one had the heart to
remove him.

The white-robed rector read the solemn
service for the dead, and then delivered a brief
address, in which he dwelt upon the
uncertainty of life, and, to the believer, the certain
blessedness of eternity. He spoke of Miss
Myrover's kindly spirit, and, as an illustration of
her love and self-sacrifice for others, referred to
her labors as a teacher of the poor ignorant
negroes who had been placed in their midst by an
all-wise Providence, and whom it was their duty
to guide and direct in the station in which God
had put them. Then the organ pealed, a prayer
was said, and the long cortége moved from the
church to the cemetery, about half a mile away,
where the body was to be interred.

When the services were over, Sophy sprang
down from her perch, and, taking her flowers,
followed the procession. She did not walk with
the rest, but at a proper and respectful distance
from the last mourner. No one noticed the little
black girl with the bunch of yellow flowers, or
thought of her as interested in the funeral.

The cortége reached the cemetery and filed
slowly through the gate; but Sophy stood
outside, looking at a small sign in white letters on
a black background: -

Sophy, thanks to Miss Myrover's painstaking
instruction, could read this sign very distinctly. In
fact, she had often read it before. For Sophy was
a child who loved beauty, in a blind, groping sort
of way, and had sometimes stood by the fence of
the cemetery and looked through at the green
mounds and shaded walks and blooming flowers
within, and wished that she might walk among
them. She knew, too, that the little sign on the
gate, though so courteously worded, was no
mere formality; for she had heard how a colored
man, who had wandered into the cemetery on a
hot night and fallen asleep on the flat top of a
tomb, had been arrested as a vagrant and fined
five dollars, which he had worked out on the
streets, with a ball-and-chain attachment, at
twenty-five cents a day. Since that time the
cemetery gate had been locked at night.

So Sophy stayed outside, and looked through
the fence. Her poor bouquet had begun to droop
by this time, and the yellow ribbon had lost some
of its freshness. Sophy could see the rector
standing by the grave, the mourners gathered
round; she could faintly distinguish the solemn
words with

“FOR WHITE PEOPLE ONLY. OTHERS PLEASE KEEP OUT”

which ashes were committed to ashes, and dust
to dust. She heard the hollow thud of the earth
falling on the coffin; and she leaned against the
iron fence, sobbing softly, until the grave was
filled and rounded off, and the wreaths and other
floral pieces were disposed upon it. When the
mourners began to move toward the gate, Sophy
walked slowly down the street, in a direction
opposite to that taken by most of the people who
came out.

When they had all gone away, and the sexton
had come out and locked the gate behind him,
Sophy crept back. Her roses were faded now,
and from some of them the petals had fallen. She
stood there irresolute, loath to leave with her
heart's desire unsatisfied, when, as her eyes
sought again the teacher's last resting-place, she
saw lying beside the new-made grave what
looked like a small bundle of white wool.
Sophy's eyes lighted up with a sudden glow.

“Prince! Here, Prince!” she called.

The little dog rose, and trotted down to the
gate. Sophy pushed the poor bouquet between
the iron bars. “Take that ter Miss Ma'y, Prince,”
she said, “that's a good doggie.”

The dog wagged his tail intelligently, took the
bouquet carefully in his mouth, carried it to his
mistress's grave, and laid it among the other
flowers. The bunch of roses was so small that
from where she stood Sophy could see only a
dash of yellow against the white background of
the mass of flowers.

When Prince had performed his mission he
turned his eyes toward Sophy inquiringly, and
when she gave him a nod of approval lay down
and resumed his watch by the graveside. Sophy
looked at him a moment with a feeling very much
like envy, and then turned and moved slowly
away.

THE WEB OF CIRCUMSTANCE
I

WITHIN a low clapboarded hut, with an
open front, a forge was glowing. In front a
blacksmith was shoeing a horse, a sleek,
well-kept animal with the signs of good blood and
breeding. A young mulatto stood by and handed
the blacksmith such tools as he needed from time
to time. A group of negroes were sitting around,
some in the shadow of the shop, one in the full
glare of the sunlight. A gentleman was seated in a
buggy a few yards away, in the shade of a
spreading elm. The horse had loosened a shoe,
and Colonel Thornton, who was a lover of fine
horseflesh, and careful of it, had stopped at Ben
Davis's blacksmith shop, as soon as he
discovered the loose shoe, to have it fastened
on.

Colonel Thornton alighted from the buggy,
looked at the shoe, signified his approval of the
job, and stood looking on while the blacksmith
and his assistant harnessed the horse to the
buggy.

“Dat's a mighty fine whip yer got dere,
Kunnel,” said Ben, while the young man was
tightening the straps of the harness on the
opposite side of the horse. “I wush I had one
like it. Where kin yer git dem whips?”

“My brother brought me this from New
York,” said the Colonel. “You can't buy them
down here.”

The whip in question was a handsome one.
The handle was wrapped with interlacing threads
of variegated colors, forming an elaborate
pattern, the lash being dark green. An octagonal
ornament of glass was set in the end of the
handle. “It cert'n'y is fine,” said Ben; “I wish I
had one like it.” He looked at the whip longingly
as Colonel Thornton drove away.

“What 's de reason I can't hab a hoss an'
buggy an' a whip like Kunnel Tho'nton's, ef I pay
fer 'em?” asked Ben. “We colored folks never
had no chance ter git nothin' befo' de wah, but ef
eve'y nigger in dis town had a tuck keer er his
money sence de wah, like I has, an' bought as
much lan' as I has, de niggers might 'a' got half de
lan' by dis time,” he went on, giving a finishing
blow to a horseshoe, and throwing it on the
ground to cool.

Carried away by his own eloquence, he did
not notice the approach of two white men who
came up the street from behind him.

“You're talkin' sense, Ben,” said one of the
white men. “Yo'r people will never be respected
till they 've got property.”

The conversation took another turn. The white
men transacted their business and went away.
The whistle of a neighboring steam sawmill blew
a raucous blast for the hour of noon, and the
loafers shuffled away in different directions.

The young man walked away. One would
have supposed, from the rapidity with which he
walked, that he was very hungry. A quarter of an
hour later the blacksmith dropped his hammer,
pulled off his leather apron, shut the front door of
the shop, and went home to dinner. He came into
the house out of the fervent heat, and, throwing
off his straw hat, wiped his brow vigorously with
a red cotton handkerchief.

“Dem collards smells good,” he said, sniffing
the odor that came in through the kitchen door,
as his good-looking yellow wife opened it to
enter the room where he was. “I 've got a
monst'us good appetite ter-day. I feels good, too.
I paid Majah Ransom de intrus' on de mortgage
dis mawnin' an' a hund'ed dollahs besides, an' I
spec's ter hab de balance ready by de fust of
nex' Jiniwary; an' den we won't owe nobody a
cent. I tell yer dere ain' nothin' like propputy ter
make a pusson feel like a man. But w'at 's de
matter wid yer, Nancy ? Is sump'n' skeered
yer?”

The woman did seem excited and ill at ease.
There was a heaving of the full bust, a quickened
breathing, that betokened suppressed
excitement.

“I - I - jes' seen a rattlesnake out in de
gyahden,” she stammered.

The blacksmith ran to the door. “Which way?
Whar wuz he?” he cried.

He heard a rustling in the bushes at one side of
the garden, and the sound of a breaking twig,
and, seizing a hoe which stood by the door, he
sprang toward the point from which the sound
came.

“No, no,” said the woman hurriedly, “it wuz
over here,” and she directed her husband's
attention to the other side of the garden.

The blacksmith, with the uplifted hoe, its sharp
blade gleaming in the sunlight, peered cautiously
among the collards and tomato plants, listening
all the while for the ominous rattle, but found
nothing.

“I reckon he's got away,” he said, as he set
the hoe up again by the door. “Whar's de
chillen?” he asked with some anxiety. “Is dey
playin' in de woods?”

“No,” answered his wife, “dey 've gone ter
de spring.”

The spring was on the opposite side of the
garden from that on which the snake was said to
have been seen, so the blacksmith sat down and
fanned himself with a palm-leaf fan until the
dinner was served.

“Yer ain't quite on time ter-day, Nancy,” he
said, glancing up at the clock on the mantel, after
the edge of his appetite had been taken off. “Got
ter make time ef yer wanter make money. Didn't
Tom tell yer I'd be heah in twenty minutes?”

The children had come in while he was
speaking, - a slender, shapely boy, yellow like
his mother, a girl several years younger, dark like
her father: both bright-looking children and
neatly dressed.

“I seen cousin Tom down by de spring,” said
the little girl, as she lifted off the pail
of water that had been balanced on her head.
“He come out er de woods jest ez we wuz fillin'
our buckets.”

“Yas,” insisted the blacksmith, “he 's got
some gal on his min'.”

II

The case of the State of North Carolina vs.
Ben Davis was called. The accused was led into
court, and took his seat in the prisoner's dock.

“Prisoner at the bar, stand up.”

The prisoner, pale and anxious, stood up. The
clerk read the indictment, in which it was charged
that the defendant by force and arms had entered
the barn of one G. W. Thornton, and feloniously
taken therefrom one whip, of the value of fifteen
dollars.

“Are you guilty or not guilty?” asked the
judge.

“Not guilty, yo' Honah; not guilty, Jedge. I
never tuck de whip.”

The State's attorney opened the case. He was
young and zealous. Recently elected to the
office, this was his first batch of cases, and he
was anxious to make as good a record as
possible. He had no doubt of the prisoner's guilt.
There had been a great deal of petty thieving in
the county, and several gentlemen had suggested
to him the necessity for greater severity in
punishing it. The jury were all white men. The
prosecuting attorney stated the case.

“We expect to show, gentlemen of the jury, the
facts set out in the indictment, - not altogether by
direct proof, but by a chain of circumstantial
evidence which is stronger even than the testimony
of eyewitnesses. Men might lie, but circumstances
cannot. We expect to show that the defendant is a
man of dangerous character, a surly, impudent
fellow; a man whose views of property are
prejudicial to the welfare of society, and who has
been heard to assert that half the property which
is owned in this county has been stolen, and that, if
justice were done, the white people ought to
divide up the land with the negroes; in other
words, a negro nihilist, a communist, a secret
devotee of Tom Paine and Voltaire, a pupil of the
anarchist propaganda, which, if not checked by
the stern hand of the law, will fasten its insidious
fangs on our social system, and drag it down to
ruin.”

“We object, may it please your Honor,” said
the defendant's attorney.“ The prosecutor
should defer his argument until the testimony is
in.”

“Confine yourself to the facts, Major,” said
the court mildly.

The prisoner sat with half-open mouth,
overwhelmed by this flood of eloquence. He had
never heard of Tom Paine or Voltaire. He had no
conception of what a nihilist or an anarchist might
be, and could not have told the difference
between a propaganda and a potato.

“We expect to show, may it please the court,
that the prisoner had been employed by Colonel
Thornton to shoe a horse; that the horse was
taken to the prisoner's blacksmith shop by a
servant of Colonel Thornton's; that, this servant
expressing a desire to go somewhere on an
errand before the horse had been shod, the
prisoner volunteered to return the horse to
Colonel Thornton's stable; that he did so, and the
following morning the whip in question was
missing; that, from circumstances, suspicion
naturally fell upon the prisoner, and a search was
made of his shop, where the whip was found
secreted; that the prisoner denied that the whip
was there, but when confronted with the
evidence of his crime, showed by his confusion
that he was guilty beyond a peradventure.”

The prisoner looked more anxious; so much
eloquence could not but be effective with the
jury.

The attorney for the defendant answered
briefly, denying the defendant's guilt, dwelling
upon his previous good character for honesty,
and begging the jury not to prejudge the case,
but to remember that the law is merciful, and that
the benefit of the doubt should be given to the
prisoner.

The prisoner glanced nervously at the jury.
There was nothing in their faces to indicate the
effect upon them of the opening statements. It
seemed to the disinterested listeners as if the
defendant's attorney had little confidence in his
client's cause.

Colonel Thornton took the stand and testified
to his ownership of the whip, the place where it
was kept, its value, and the fact that it had
disappeared. The whip was produced in court
and identified by the witness. He also testified to
the conversation at the blacksmith
shop in the course of which the prisoner
had expressed a desire to possess a similar whip.
The cross-examination was brief, and no attempt
was made to shake the Colonel's testimony.

The next witness was the constable who had
gone with a warrant to search Ben's shop. He
testified to the circumstances under which the
whip was found.

“He wuz brazen as a mule at fust, an' wanted
ter git mad about it. But when we begun ter turn
over that pile er truck in the cawner, he kinder
begun ter trimble; when the whip-handle stuck
out, his eyes commenced ter grow big, an' when
we hauled the whip out he turned pale ez ashes,
an' begun to swear he did n' take the whip an'
did n' know how it got thar.”

“You may cross-examine,” said the
prosecuting attorney triumphantly.

The prisoner felt the weight of the testimony,
and glanced furtively at the jury, and then
appealingly at his lawyer.

“You say that Ben denied that he had stolen
the whip,” said the prisoner's attorney, on
cross-examination.“ Did it not occur to you that
what you took for brazen impudence
might have been but the evidence of conscious
innocence?”

The witness grinned incredulously, revealing
thereby a few blackened fragments of teeth.

“I've tuck up more 'n a hundred niggers fer
stealin', Kurnel, an' I never seed one yit that did n'
'ny it ter the las'.”

“Answer my question. Might not the witness's
indignation have been a manifestation of
conscious innocence? Yes or no?”

“Yes, it mought, an' the moon mought
fall - but it don't.”

Further cross-examination did not weaken the
witness's testimony, which was very damaging,
and every one in the court room felt instinctively
that a strong defense would be required to break
down the State's case.

“The State rests,” said the prosecuting
attorney, with a ring in his voice which spoke of
certain victory.

There was a temporary lull in the proceedings,
during which a bailiff passed a pitcher of water
and a glass along the line of jurymen. The
defense was then begun.

The law in its wisdom did not permit the
defendant to testify in his own behalf. There
were no witnesses to the facts, but several were
called to testify to Ben's good character. The
colored witnesses made him out possessed of all
the virtues. One or two white men testified that
they had never known anything against his
reputation for honesty.

The defendant rested his case, and the State
called its witnesses in rebuttal. They were entirely
on the point of character. One testified that he
had heard the prisoner say that, if the negroes
had their rights, they would own at least half the
property. Another testified that he had heard the
defendant say that the negroes spent too much
money on churches, and that they cared a good
deal more for God than God had ever seemed to
care for them.

Ben Davis listened to this testimony with
half-open mouth and staring eyes. Now and then he
would lean forward and speak perhaps a word,
when his attorney would shake a warning finger
at him, and he would fall back helplessly, as if
abandoning himself to fate; but for a moment
only, when he would resume his puzzled look.

The arguments followed. The prosecuting
attorney briefly summed up the evidence, and
characterized it as almost a mathematical proof
of the prisoner's guilt. He reserved his eloquence
for the closing argument.

The defendant's attorney had a headache, and
secretly believed his client guilty. His address
sounded more like an appeal for mercy than a
demand for justice. Then the State's attorney
delivered the maiden argument of his office, the
speech that made his reputation as an orator, and
opened up to him a successful political career.

The judge's charge to the jury was a plain,
simple statement of the law as applied to
circumstantial evidence, and the mere statement
of the law foreshadowed the verdict.

The eyes of the prisoner were glued to the
jury-box, and he looked more and more like a hunted
animal. In the rear of the crowd of blacks who
filled the back part of the room, partly concealed
by the projecting angle of the fireplace, stood
Tom, the blacksmith's assistant. If the face is the
mirror of the soul, then this man's soul, taken off
its guard in this moment of excitement, was full of
lust and envy and all evil passions.

The jury filed out of their box, and into the
jury room behind the judge's stand.
There was a moment of relaxation in the court
room. The lawyers fell into conversation across
the table. The judge beckoned to Colonel
Thornton, who stepped forward, and they
conversed together a few moments. The prisoner
was all eyes and ears in this moment of waiting,
and from an involuntary gesture on the part of the
judge he divined that they were speaking of him.
It is a pity he could not hear what was said.

“How do you feel about the case, Colonel?”
asked the judge.

“Let him off easy,” replied Colonel Thornton.
“He 's the best blacksmith in the county.”

The business of the court seemed to have
halted by tacit consent, in anticipation of a quick
verdict. The suspense did not last long. Scarcely
ten minutes had elapsed when there was a rap on
the door, the officer opened it, and the jury came
out.

The prisoner, his soul in his eyes, sought their
faces, but met no reassuring glance; they were all
looking away from him.

“Gentlemen of the jury, have you agreed
upon a verdict?”

“We have,” responded the foreman. The
clerk of the court stepped forward and took the
fateful slip from the foreman's hand.

The clerk read the verdict: “We, the jury
impaneled and sworn to try the issues in this
cause, do find the prisoner guilty as charged in
the indictment.”

There was a moment of breathless silence.
Then a wild burst of grief from the prisoner's
wife, to which his two children, not understanding
it all, but vaguely conscious of some calamity,
added their voices in two long, discordant wails,
which would have been ludicrous had they not
been heart-rending.

The face of the young man in the back of the
room expressed relief and badly concealed
satisfaction. The prisoner fell back upon the seat
from which he had half risen in his anxiety, and
his dark face assumed an ashen hue. What he
thought could only be surmised. Perhaps,
knowing his innocence, he had not believed
conviction possible; perhaps, conscious of guilt,
he dreaded the punishment, the extent of which
was optional with the judge, within very wide
limits. Only one other person present knew
whether or not he was guilty, and that other had
slunk furtively from the court room.

Some of the spectators wondered why there
should be so much ado about convicting a negro
of stealing a buggy-whip. They had forgotten
their own interest of the moment before. They
did not realize out of what trifles grow the
tragedies of life.

It was four o'clock in the afternoon, the hour
for adjournment, when the verdict was returned.
The judge nodded to the bailiff.

“Oyez, oyez! this court is now adjourned until
ten o'clock to-morrow morning,” cried the bailiff
in a singsong voice. The judge left the bench, the
jury filed out of the box, and a buzz of
conversation filled the court room.

“Brace up, Ben, brace up, my boy,” said the
defendant's lawyer, half apologetically. “I did
what I could for you, but you can never tell what
a jury will do. You won't be sentenced till
to-morrow morning. In the meantime I'll speak to
the judge and try to get him to be easy with you.
He may let you off with a light fine.”

The negro pulled himself together, and by an
effort listened.

“Thanky, Majah,” was all he said. He
seemed to be thinking of something far away.

He barely spoke to his wife when she
frantically threw herself on him, and clung to his
neck, as he passed through the side room on his
way to jail. He kissed his children mechanically,
and did not reply to the soothing remarks made
by the jailer.

III

There was a good deal of excitement in
town the next morning. Two white men stood
by the post office talking.

“Did yer hear the news?”

“No, what wuz it?”

“Ben Davis tried ter break jail las' night.”

“You don't say so! What a fool! He ain't
be'n sentenced yit.”

“Well, now,” said the other, “I've knowed
Ben a long time, an' he wuz a right good nigger.
I kinder found it hard ter b'lieve he did steal that
whip. But what 's a man's feelin's ag'in' the proof?”

They spoke on awhile, using the past tense as
if they were speaking of a dead man.

At ten o'clock the prisoner was brought into
court. He walked with shambling gait, bent at the
shoulders, hopelessly, with downcast eyes, and
took his seat with several other prisoners who
had been brought in for sentence. His wife,
accompanied by the children, waited behind him,
and a number of his friends were gathered in the
court room.

The first prisoner sentenced was a young white
man, convicted several days before of
manslaughter. The deed was done in the heat of
passion, under circumstances of great
provocation, during a quarrel about a woman.
The prisoner was admonished of the sanctity of
human life, and sentenced to one year in the
penitentiary.

The next case was that of a young clerk,
eighteen or nineteen years of age, who had
committed a forgery in order to procure the
means to buy lottery tickets. He was well
connected, and the case would not have been
prosecuted if the judge had not refused to allow
it to be nolled, and, once brought to trial, a
conviction could not have been avoided.

“You are a young man,” said the judge
gravely, yet not unkindly, “and your life is
yet before you. I regret that you should have
been led into evil courses by the lust for
speculation, so dangerous in its tendencies, so
fruitful of crime and misery. I am led to believe
that you are sincerely penitent, and that, after
such punishment as the law cannot remit without
bringing itself into contempt, you will see the
error of your ways and follow the strict path of
rectitude. Your fault has entailed distress not only
upon yourself, but upon your relatives, people of
good name and good family, who suffer as
keenly from your disgrace as you yourself. Partly
out of consideration for their feelings, and partly
because I feel that, under the circumstances, the
law will be satisfied by the penalty I shall inflict, I
sentence you to imprisonment in the county jail
for six months, and a fine of one hundred dollars
and the costs of this action.”

He might have said “Ben Davis, wake up,” for
the jailer had to touch the prisoner on the
shoulder to rouse him from his stupor. He stood
up, and something of the hunted look came again
into his eyes, which shifted under the stern glance
of the judge.

“Ben Davis, you have been convicted of
larceny, after a fair trial before twelve good men
of this county. Under the testimony, there can be
no doubt of your guilt. The case is an aggravated
one. You are not an ignorant, shiftless fellow, but
a man of more than ordinary intelligence among
your people, and one who ought to know better.
You have not even the poor excuse of having
stolen to satisfy hunger or a physical appetite.
Your conduct is wholly without excuse, and I can
only regard your crime as the result of a
tendency to offenses of this nature, a tendency
which is only too common among your people; a
tendency which is a menace to civilization, a
menace to society itself, for society rests upon
the sacred right of property. Your opinions, too,
have been given a wrong turn; you have been
heard to utter sentiments which, if disseminated
among an ignorant people, would breed
discontent, and give rise to strained relations
between them and their best friends, their old
masters, who understand
their real nature and their real needs,
and to whose justice and enlightened
guidance they can safely trust. Have you
anything to say why sentence should not
be passed upon you?”

“Nothin', suh, cep'n dat I did n' take de
whip.”

“The law, largely, I think, in view of the
peculiar circumstances of your unfortunate
race, has vested a large discretion in courts
as to the extent of the punishment for
offenses of this kind. Taking your case as a
whole, I am convinced that it is one which,
for the sake of the example, deserves a severe
punishment. Nevertheless, I do not feel
disposed to give you the full extent of the law,
which would be twenty years in the penitentiary,1
but, considering the fact that you have
a family, and have heretofore borne a good
reputation in the community, I will impose
upon you the light sentence of imprisonment
for five years in the penitentiary at hard
labor. And I hope that this will be a warning
to you and others who may be similarly
1. There are no degrees of larceny in North Carolina, and
the penalty for any offense lies in the discretion of the judge,
to the limit of twenty years.
disposed, and that after your sentence has
expired you may lead the life of a law-abiding
citizen.”

“Keep back, Nancy, keep back,” said the
jailer. “You can see him in jail.”

Several people were looking at Ben's face.
There was one flash of despair, and then
nothing but a stony blank, behind which he
masked his real feelings, whatever they were.

Human character is a compound of
tendencies inherited and habits acquired. In the
anxiety, the fear of disgrace, spoke the
nineteenth century civilization with which Ben
Davis had been more or less closely in touch
during twenty years of slavery and fifteen
years of freedom. In the stolidity with which
he received this sentence for a crime which he
had not committed, spoke who knows what
trait of inherited savagery? For stoicism is
a savage virtue.

IV

One morning in June, five years later, a
black man limped slowly along the old
Lumberton plank road; a tall man, whose bowed
shoulders made him seem shorter than he was,
and a face from which it was difficult to guess
his years, for in it the wrinkles and flabbiness
of age were found side by side with firm white
teeth, and eyes not sunken, - eyes bloodshot,
and burning with something, either fever or
passion. Though he limped painfully with
one foot, the other hit the ground impatiently,
like the good horse in a poorly matched team.
As he walked along, he was talking to himself: -

“I wonder what dey 'll do w'en I git back?
I wonder how Nancy 's s'ported the fambly
all dese years? Tuck in washin', I s'ppose, -
she was a monst'us good washer an' ironer.
I wonder ef de chillun 'll be too proud ter
recognize deir daddy come back f'um de
penetenchy? I 'spec' Billy must be a big boy
by dis time. He won' b'lieve his daddy ever
stole anything. I'm gwine ter slip roun' an'
s'prise 'em.”

Five minutes later a face peered cautiously
into the window of what had once been Ben
Davis's cabin - at first an eager face, its
coarseness lit up with the fire of hope; a
moment later a puzzled face; then an anxious,
fearful face as the man stepped away from
the window and rapped at the door.

“Is Mis' Davis home?” he asked of the
woman who opened the door.

“Mis' Davis don' live here. You er mistook
in de house.”

“Whose house is dis?”

“It b'longs ter my husban', Mr. Smith -
Primus Smith.”

“ 'Scuse me, but I knowed de house some
years ago w'en I wuz here oncet on a visit,
an' it b'longed ter a man name' Ben Davis.”

The man with the bundle went on until he
came to a creek that crossed the road. He
descended the sloping bank, and, sitting on a
stone in the shade of a water-oak, took off his
coarse brogans, unwound the rags that served
him in lieu of stockings, and laved in the
cool water the feet that were chafed with
many a weary mile of travel.

After five years of unrequited toil, and
unspeakable hardship in convict camps, -
five years of slaving by the side of human
brutes, and of nightly herding with them in
vermin-haunted huts, - Ben Davis had
become like them. For a while he had received
occasional letters from home, but in the shifting
life of the convict camp they had long
since ceased to reach him, if indeed they had
been written. For a year or two, the
consciousness of his innocence had helped to
make him resist the debasing influences that
surrounded him. The hope of shortening his
sentence by good behavior, too, had worked
a similar end. But the transfer from one
contractor to another, each interested in
keeping as long as possible a good worker, had
speedily dissipated any such hope. When
hope took flight, its place was not long
vacant. Despair followed, and black hatred of
all mankind, hatred especially of the man to
whom he attributed all his misfortunes. One
who is suffering unjustly is not apt to indulge
in fine abstractions, nor to balance probabilities.
By long brooding over his wrongs, his
mind became, if not unsettled, at least warped,
and he imagined that Colonel Thornton had
deliberately set a trap into which he had
fallen. The Colonel, he convinced himself,
had disapproved of his prosperity, and had
schemed to destroy it. He reasoned himself
into the belief that he represented in his
person the accumulated wrongs of a whole
race, and Colonel Thornton the race who had
oppressed them. A burning desire for revenge
sprang up in him, and he nursed it
until his sentence expired and he was set at
liberty. What he had learned since reaching
home had changed his desire into a
deadly purpose.

When he had again bandaged his feet and
slipped them into his shoes, he looked around
him, and selected a stout sapling from among
the undergrowth that covered the bank of
the stream. Taking from his pocket a huge
clasp-knife, he cut off the length of an ordinary
walking stick and trimmed it. The result
was an ugly-looking bludgeon, a dangerous
weapon when in the grasp of a strong man.

With the stick in his hand, he went on
down the road until he approached a large
white house standing some distance back from
the street. The grounds were filled with a
profusion of shrubbery. The negro entered
the gate and secreted himself in the bushes,
at a point where he could hear any one that
might approach.

It was near midday, and he had not eaten.
He had walked all night, and had not slept.
The hope of meeting his loved ones had been
meat and drink and rest for him. But as he
sat waiting, outraged nature asserted itself,
and he fell asleep, with his head on the rising
root of a tree, and his face upturned.

And as he slept, he dreamed of his childhood;
of an old black mammy taking care of
him in the daytime, and of a younger face,
with soft eyes, which bent over him sometimes
at night, and a pair of arms which
clasped him closely. He dreamed of his past,
- of his young wife, of his bright children.
Somehow his dreams all ran to pleasant
themes for a while.

Then they changed again. He dreamed
that he was in the convict camp, and, by an
easy transition, that he was in hell, consumed
with hunger, burning with thirst. Suddenly
the grinning devil who stood over him with
a barbed whip faded away, and a little white
angel came and handed him a drink of water.
As he raised it to his lips the glass slipped,
and he struggled back to consciousness.

A sweet little child, as beautiful as a cherub
escaped from Paradise, was standing over him.
At first he scarcely comprehended the words
the baby babbled out. But as they became
clear to him, a novel feeling crept slowly over
his heart. It had been so long since he had
heard anything but curses and stern words of
command, or the ribald songs of obscene
merriment, that the clear tones of this voice
from heaven cooled his calloused heart as the
water of the brook had soothed his blistered
feet. It was so strange, so unwonted a thing,
that he lay there with half-closed eyes while
the child brought leaves and flowers and laid
them on his face and on his breast, and
arranged them with little caressing taps.

She moved away, and plucked a flower.
And then she spied another farther on, and
then another, and, as she gathered them, kept
increasing the distance between herself and
the man lying there, until she was several
rods away.

Ben Davis watched her through eyes over
which had come an unfamiliar softness.
Under the lingering spell of his dream, her
golden hair, which fell in rippling curls,
seemed like a halo of purity and innocence
and peace, irradiating the atmosphere around
her. It is true the thought occurred to Ben,
vaguely, that through harm to her he might
inflict the greatest punishment upon her
father; but the idea came like a dark shape
that faded away and vanished into nothingness
as soon as it came within the nimbus
that surrounded the child's person.

The child was moving on to pluck still
another flower, when there came a sound of
hoof-beats, and Ben was aware that a
horseman, visible through the shrubbery, was
coming along the curved path that led from the
gate to the house. It must be the man he
was waiting for, and now was the time to
wreak his vengeance. He sprang to his feet,
grasped his club, and stood for a moment
irresolute. But either the instinct of the
convict, beaten, driven, and debased, or the
influence of the child, which was still strong
upon him, impelled him, after the first
momentary pause, to flee as though seeking safety.

His flight led him toward the little girl,
whom he must pass in order to make his
escape, and as Colonel Thornton turned the
corner of the path he saw a desperate-looking
negro, clad in filthy rags, and carrying in his
hand a murderous bludgeon, running toward
the child, who, startled by the sound of footsteps,
had turned and was looking toward the
approaching man with wondering eyes. A
sickening fear came over the father's heart,
and drawing the ever-ready revolver, which
according to the Southern custom he carried
always upon his person, he fired with
unerring aim. Ben Davis ran a few yards
farther, faltered, threw out his hands, and
fell dead at the child's feet.

Some time, we are told, when the cycle of
years has rolled around, there is to be another
golden age, when all men will dwell together
in love and harmony, and when peace
and righteousness shall prevail for a thousand
years. God speed the day, and let not the
shining thread of hope become so enmeshed
in the web of circumstance that we lose sight
of it; but give us here and there, and now
and then, some little foretaste of this golden
age, that we may the more patiently and
hopefully await its coming!